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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT 



PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 



PERSONALITY 

IN 

EDUCATION 



BY 
JAMES P. CONOVER 

(Master in St. Paul's School, Concord, N. H.) 



NEW YORK 

MOFFAT, YARD AND COMPANY 
1908 



1-3 



01 
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LISRARY of CONGRESS 
1 wo Copies Recsived 

NOV 5 t9oa 

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CLASS ex. ■'^Ac, !M.o, 



Copyright, 1908, by 
MOFFAT, YARD AND COMPANY 



All Bights Beserved 
Pablished, October, 1908 



CONTENTS 

Intkodtjction ix 

I. The Teacher ...... 1 

11. The Child 31 

III. The Nursery 45 

IV. School 66 

V. Some Questions of Expense ... 95 

VI. The Playground 104 

VII. Discipline 118 

VIII. The Class 155 

IX. Classwork . . . ' . . . . 180 

X. Examinations 209 

XI. Religion in the School .... 225 

XII. College 254 



INTRODUCTION 

The essays in this book are the observa- 
tions of a workman, recorded from time to 
time amid the noise and business of the 
shop. For this reason they should be 
worth reading. A review of the collection 
has disclosed a certain amount of repeti- 
tion arising from the fact that the different 
subjects were treated at ditferent times as 
complete in themselves and not parts of a 
whole ; but this review has also disclosed a 
theme throughout which the writer has ven- 
tured to call '' Personality in Education." 

An apology is certainly due to so great a 
subject for dragging it into the atmosphere 
of machinery and oil which pervades these 
pages. Therefore, the writer doffs his cap 
while he points to his overalls and says, 
* ' Please let me have my hour of play with- 
out a change of clothes." A little playful- 
ness in the shop is prime oil for the ma- 
chinery of the school. 

It is hoped, indeed, that the '' play " of 



X INTRODUCTION 

philosopliy to be found here will bring into 
the study, the schoolroom, and the home 
something of the life for which all method 
exists. There is always present the danger 
of too much trust in method. As experi- 
ence increases, the true workman perfects 
his method, but not without proportion- 
ately perfecting himself. In fact, ' ' life in 
method " is a phrase that very nearly de- 
scribes the unconscious effort underlying 
these essays. 

Young teachers fresh from college or 
seminary enter their work as if fully 
equipped. They think they have all the 
best methods at their fingers' ends, and 
they wonder why it is that their scholars 
do not at once glow with their own enthu- 
siasm. Even the distance of a quarter of 
a century cannot blot out the feeling of 
injured pride with which the writer con- 
templates in the light of his after expe- 
rience how thoroughly he made a fool of 
himself. That, no doubt, is all very good 
discipline for the teacher, but hardly so 
good for the child. And it does seem as if 
schools should more fully realize their re- 
sponsibilities to young teachers; should 
realize their duty to give beginners in this 



INTRODUCTION xi 

profession the same kind of professional 
Help which is given to young doctors and 
lawyers. It is an amazing thing that, 
whereas beginners in the practice of med- 
icine and law are considered of little ac- 
count till they have had practice under ex- 
perienced guidance, beginners among the 
clergy and teaching professions in general 
are, as a rule, at once launched into a ' ' sea 
of troubles " on which they are to pilot 
themselves and their charges to safety. 
There can be no reason for this except 
that, in the popular conception, a man's 
body and pocket are of more value and of 
more delicate structure than his mind and 
heart, or even than his soul; for to the 
teacher especially belongs the training of 
the whole man, the fruits of which are to 
be seen primarily in that distinctive life 
of man which we call the soul. 

Let us hope that the time is not far away 
when the first duty of the school will be not 
only a provision for the personal upbuild- 
ing of every teacher, but also for a system 
by wliich each inexperienced man will be 
given his early practice under the same 
kind of supervision which the young doctor 
gets at the hospital. 



xii INTRODUCTION 

' ' Personality ' ' being the theme of this 
book, the writer has made free use of quo- 
tation. President Hyde of Bowdoin, and 
Dr. Briggs, formerly dean of Harvard, 
are inspiring leaders to all teachers who 
have been fortunate enough to know them 
or even to read their words to men and 
women of our profession. 

Edward Thring's book on the " Theory 
and Practice of Teaching " has been a 
handbook to some of us who were start- 
ing our labors when Uppingham was first 
mourning the loss of its great head-master. 

The writer indeed claims no originality, 
especially while he still works and writes 
on the ground so thoroughly saturated 
with the life of our own great school- 
master, Henry Augustus Coit. 

The thanks of the writer are due to 
the Rev. Latta Griswold, of St. George's 
School, Newport, R. I., for the reading and 
correcting of proofs. 

St. Paul'9 School, Concord, N. H., 
October 1, 1908. 



PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 



THE TEACHER 

TO teach the child we must have a 
teacher. Though this is a self-evi- 
dent proposition, it is not always duly con- 
sidered. There have been times in the de- 
velopment of the nation's life when little 
account was made of the teacher. Some 
of us may remember that, comparatively 
speaking, * ' any one was good enough to be 
a teacher." It is now, however, one of the 
encouraging signs of the times in Amer- 
ica that the teacher is fast coming to his 
own. 

There can be no doubt that in itself 
teaching is a great profession. When this 
is said, it is of course assumed that by 
** teaching " is implied the moulding of 
character. When souls are being tried out 
by fighting the enemies of our country, or 



2 PERSOxNALITY IN EDUCATION 

by the excitement and work of the pioneer, 
the teacher is a small factor in the land ; he 
is considered the weakling of the commu- 
nity. But as life becomes less intense, and 
the stream becomes broader, the deep chan- 
nels are not so evident, and pilots are in 
demand. In the sunny and often shallow 
waters of peace, it is to the teacher that we 
look more and more for guidance and dis- 
cipline, lest we arrive not at the fair ocean 
of God's love. The institutional church no 
longer controls the supply ; in our day men 
and women from all quarters are awaken- 
ing to the nobleness of the profession, and 
in ever increasing numbers are arising to 
obey the command " G-o, teach." Further- 
more, they are discovering that girls and 
boys have for them a more enduring in- 
terest than stocks or merchandise, and 
they are finding that cultivation and re- 
finement in themselves have no truer or 
more satisfactory expression than in their 
reproduction in the next generation. Noth- 
ing is so fine in this world as human life; 
so it may well be said that of all profes- 
sions none is so fine as that which has for 
its object the proper training and develop- 
ment of that life, and no man may look 



THE TEACHER 8 

with such confidence as the teacher for the 
high award. 

Let us, then, who are teachers, be sure 
that we rise to an appreciation of the 
greatness of our vocation. Our standard 
of private life as well as of public service 
should be nothing short of that of the 
Great Teacher Himself. For after all im- 
provements in books, methods, and ap- 
pliances, the teacher is the one abso- 
lute requisite, and all true advance must 
go through him; he must ever be the ex- 
ponent of what he is teaching. This is a 
New Testament axiom about teachers; yet 
many fail to appreciate its far-reaching 
application. The public are perceiving, 
however, something of its force in 
the fact that children are learning in 
our public schools, from which religion 
has been excluded, much of the es- 
sence of religion, through the personal- 
ity of their teachers; and from all the 
great educators comes steadily the call 
for the teacher of strong and uplifting 
personality. 

President Hyde, in " The College Man 
and College Woman," writes: " Some 
people can teach school and others can't. 



4 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

Some teacliers have good order, as a mat- 
ter of course, as soon as they set their feet 
in a school classroom. Other teachers can 
never get anything more than the outward 
semblance of decorum, try as hard as they 
will ; and often cannot get even that. Some 
teachers the scholars all love. Other teach- 
ers they all hate. Some teachers a super- 
intendent or president will jump at the 
chance to secure after a five minutes' inter- 
view. Others, equally scholarly, equally 
experienced, equally well equipped with 
formal recommendations, go wandering 
from agency to agency, from one vacant 
place to another, only to find that some 
other applicant has secured or is about to 
secure the coveted position. 

' ' For nearly twenty years I have had to 
employ teachers every year, and to recom- 
mend teachers to others. I have seen many 
succeed and some fail. But I have never 
seen success that could be accounted for by 
scholarship and training alone. I have 
never seen a failure that I could not ac- 
count for on other grounds. What is it 
then that makes one teacher popular, suc- 
cessful, wanted in a dozen different places ; 
and another equally well trained, equally 



THE TEACHER 6 

experienced, a dismal failure where he is, 
and wanted nowhere else? 

" The one word that covers all these 
qualities is personality." *^' 

One may say to all this, * ' Very true ; but 
personality is hereditary." 

*' Yes and no both." 

It is true, no doubt, that personality is 
hereditary, and that men and women of 
good stock make the best teachers. But it 
is also true that personality is largely a 
matter in our own hands, and a diligent ap- 
plication to things that count in our pro- 
fession always has its reward. The teacher 
has this advantage over the other profes- 
sional man: namely, that his critics are 
constantly at hand. His class is a mir- 
ror in which he may see himself for the 
looking. As he polishes it, he is sure to 
get, now and then, a grotesque image of 
himself, for which, if he is wise, he is duly 
thankful. Let no good man, then, despair. 
We have seen many men turn early failure 
to years of happy success. It is, therefore, 
to my own personality that I must give 
first place. 

Now for some of the essentials in this 
personality. The first of these is undoubt- 



6 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

edly truth. The second, sympathy, or, to 
state it more hroadly, unselfishness. While 
Dean of Harvard Dr. Briggs wrote from 
his wide experience: '* No school or col- 
lege discipline can be perfect; but school 
and college discipline become more nearly 
perfect according as the teachers possess, 
beside strong character, unquestioned sym- 
pathy with young people and unquestioned 
integrity. When I say, ' unquestioned,' I 
imply tact, courtesy, and possibly humor; 
for without at least the first of these quali- 
ties no sympathy can be unquestioned, and 
without the others some sympathy misses 
fire. Tact, courtesy, and a sense of humor 
are in most of us intermittent, and hence 
some of our failures. Men may be able, 
upright, and genuinely sympathetic, yet 
quite unable to make young people know 
their sympathy or even feel their upright- 
ness, except on long acquaintance. Such 
men are, among young people, ineffective. 
A just teacher may be hated and an unjust 
teacher loved, if the just man cannot show 
sympathy at short notice and the unjust 
man cannot help showing it. . . . 

'* In teachers of boys ready sympathy 
and absolute straightforwardness are so 



THE TEACHER 7 

important, that I, for one, place them above 
high scholarship. . . . The difficulty is 
that, though no teacher can have learned 
too much, yet the love of learning may un- 
fit a man to be a teacher of boys. . . . The 
modern schoolmaster's work is vastly more 
than having or even imparting knowledge. 
It penetrates and compasses the boy's 
whole living ; it cannot be done without en- 
thusiastic drudgery in small and unlearned 
things, without a devotion to commonplace 
details, such as characterizes a good 
mother's care of a young child, without 
what a man of remote learning regards as 
wasting time, without a deliberate putting 
into the background of what people call the 
development and expansion of one's own 
self. * I want,' young teachers write, ' a 
larger field for my own growth and my own 
career.' Yet often, as Dr. Holmes would 
say, in the place they already occupy they 
' rattle round ' ; they fail to know their far- 
reaching power where they are for good or 
for evil, and to know that out of the very 
things they are shirking now come the 
growth and the career. ... It is of vital 
importance what sort of men our school- 
masters are." 



8 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

If a teacher is not a true man he has 
missed his profession. There may be an 
appearance of progress under a man who 
is one thing in the class and another thing 
in his own life. Grammars may be com- 
mitted to memory, the writers of the world 
may be studied, examinations in science 
may be passed, but the boy who sits 
under a false man and himself grows to be 
a true man does so through his native force 
of character in spite of his teacher. The 
majority of young people had better never y 
be in any class than in one under a false 
man or a false woman. This seems so clear 
as to be self-evident, yet it is my experi- 
ence that nothing is so easily forgotten; 
we all run so quickly to cover and hide our- 
selves behind some mask of fancied power 
or beauty. And the young trustful child 
takes it all for granted; he is so easy to 
dupe, and he, in turn, learns his own lesson 
in deceit without being aware of the proc- 
ess or the result till it is too late. He 
finds me out eventually, but he is gone, and 
I am practising my fooleries on the next 
lot. If, however, I should carry such a 
personality to the older boys or men, they 
would make me over into a decent man or 



THE TEACHER 9 

turn me out. By the very young, pictures 
are easily and unconsciously learned, and, 
above all others, the picture of a life. The 
influence of the elder and more formed 
character upon the younger is not easily 
overestimated. Children may be bullied 
and tricked into order and a certain kind 
of attention; they will admire the grand 
manner and obey the voice and gesture of 
the charlatan, but their hearts are not won ; 
and worse than all is the destructive lesson 
in the shallowness of man. It surely is 
better that a man should never have been 
born than that he should cause one of these 
little ones to lose faith. A child is a hero 
worshipper before he is a critic, and often 
an unconscious mimic of what he may 
afterward despise. 

Truth in a man prompts him to be 
humble-minded, to strive to see himself as 
others see him, and to abandon all habits 
of pretence. The humility of the scholar is 
not at once appreciated by the young ; but, 
among many other desirable things not 
natural to man, this stands as one highly 
important lesson set for us to teach; and 
there is only one way to teach humility, 
and that is to he humble-minded. It not 



10 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

only helps to keep a man from making mis- 
takes himself if he is ready to acknowledge 
them, but it is often encouraging to the 
child to find that in his teacher he has a 
fellow learner. The true man can always 
afford to be known; and he is a gainer 
thereby in the mutual fellowship that is 
sure to grow from truth and humility. 
/^. As truth begets humility so also does it 
beget purity. A true heart refuses to 
cherish what would be shameful in act; it 
becomes a jealous guardian of thought and 
motive. These remarks are of the nature 
of platitudes, yet it seems to me that the 
teacher is often in a fair way to forget how 
insidious are many things innocent in 
themselves, if they convey impure sugges- 
tion. The comparative innocence of the 
child or youth does not at the time con- 
sciously note the more subtle phases of a 
man's character, but none the less the pic- 
ture is steadily growing in clearness, and, 
all unnoted by man or boy, turns of thought 
and expression are doing their work on 
what may be called the subconscious life of 
the younger, to bear bitter fruit in years 
to come. My fellow teachers, have you not 
seen it? I confess that at times I am 



THE TEACHER 11 

haunted with a dread of what I all uncon- 
sciously may have done to hasten the fall 
of this or that man whom I once knew in- 
timately as a pure-minded, open-hearted 
boy. Rigid self-examination of our man- 
ners and habits, backed by regular exercise 
and the companionship of noble literature 
and friends of one's own age, seems to me 
indispensable to those in the early years of 
our profession. 

As humility and purity are the results of 
the application of truth to ourselves, so 
justice is the result of the application of 
truth to our charges. Is it not remarkable 
how truth, or rather, the constant endeavor 
to see and act the truth in all things, 
broadens the intellect and heart, so that 
even the narrow man becomes able to see 
his boys in the true light in which God has 
made them and brought them to him to be 
taught 1 And the woman of ready sympathy 
and quick instinct, if she is a searcher after 
truth, is led into broader fields of vision 
and opportunity. No doubt one of the le- 
gitimate rewards of the teacher is the bond 
of friendship which grows between himself 
and the feiv of his pupils, yet it must never 
be forgotten that a child is a child, a boy is 



12 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

a boy, and if the man's craving for sym- 
pathy or appreciation leads him to treat 
such as his equal, he does an injustice both 
to himself and to the child, and the sure 
consequence is disappointment. Some of 
these children are far above us in every 
way. I sometimes come close to one whom 
I feel it a privilege to have known, from 
whom I have received new and higher con- 
ceptions of duty and life; yet there is 
always the immaturity in such boys whose 
very beauty is spoiled by being plastered, 
so to speak, with the features of the man. 
Moreover, in opening one's heart even to 
the legitimate intimacies of the young, 
there is always an added danger of injus- 
tice. I Justice is very hard to exercise, if 
one is warm-hearted and sympathetic. 
While sympathy is a gift absolutely neces- 
sary to the successful teacher, justice is 
more important, not so much for the sake of 
one's own power, but as part of the impres- 
sion of truth to be made upon the child. 
And over and above the personality or 
power of the teacher, the main point is 
simple : namely, what is due to each one / 
of our charges whether he be lovely or 
unlovely. The thoughtlessness of the 



THE TEACHER 13 

young, their expectation of everything 
being done for them, and hence their disre- 
gard of a teacher's rights, form no excuse 
for our disregard of theirs. With bad grace 
indeed from a teacher comes a plea for jus- 
tice to himself in exculpation of some 
neglect ; and with equally bad grace does he 
show favor to those who show favor to him. 
There is positively no excuse for discour- 
tesy to any child ; on the contrary, 

"Maxima debeturpuero reverentia," 

is a motto for us all. No matter what the 
offence of the child, for us is the counsel, 
*' Fathers, provoke not your children to 
wrath." Yet the kind of " offence " that 
falls upon the child from a too rigid ap- 
plication of justice has nothing in com- 
mon with the '' offence " offered by the 
man who is not true. Though the first 
may provoke wrath and a deal of unpleas- 
antness, and the second pass unnoticed or 
followed for the time, in after years the 
child will rise up and call the first man 
*' blessed " and the second '* cursed." I 
well remember a teacher of my youth who 
rarely allowed himself to show any sym- 



14 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

pathy. The consequence was a dull, spirit- 
less class, with many failures in work. The 
man's sense of justice was so exacting as 
to dominate the whole atmosphere of the 
room. After listening in perfect quiet to a 
translation, while making small dots on his 
marking sheet, he would say, ' ' Norris, you 
may sit down now. I have no more room 
to register your mistakes.'* Nevertheless, 
while the actual work of the Csesar became 
irksome, the integrity and justice of the 
man were doing a higher work. Never 
could some of us forget this man; the 
close touch with such a character, little 
appreciated at the time, has grown in 
my memory as a thing to be cherished 
reverently. 

Next to truth and its plainer corollaries, 
follows unselfishness. To give truth ample 
scope in any case, we must be unselfish. 
The true man comes eventually to see that 
truth demands self-surrender. The life of 
the great scientist and seeker after truth, 
Huxley, is inspiring and instructive in 
many ways, and not the least in this, that 
in his later days he attained to a wonderful 
humility and submission which were prac- 
tically a real Christian sacrifice. 



THE TEACHER 15 

The spirit of sacrifice begets such a habit 
of self-forgetfulness that a man will attain 
to the best of the old Stoic philosophy; he 
will be independent of outside worry or in- 
side pain, a state of being quite necessary 
for the man who would be a successful 
teacher, and yet one very difficult to acquire 
except through the spirit of sacrifice. 
Self-forgetfulness, therefore, we may call 
the first corollary to unselfishness. This 
is far better as a cure for the ills of 
the teacher than the fooleries of so- 
called Christian Science. To quote again 
from President Hyde: *' The Christian 
Scientist with the toothache says there is 
no matter to ache. The Stoic, both truer 
to the fact and braver in spirit, says there 
is matter, but it doesn't matter if there is. 
Stoicism teaches us that the mental states 
are the man ; that external things never, in 
themselves, constitute a mental state ; that 
the all-important contribution is made by 
the mind itself ; that this contribution from 
the mind is what gives the tone and de- 
termines the worth of the total mental 
state, and that this contribution is ex- 
clusively our own affair and may be 
brought entirely under our own control." 



16 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

No profession probably is so full of heart- 
burnings over failures of self, poverty of 
means, and discouragements in children and 
colleagues as our own. If we are any good, 
our ideals are high, and consequently disap- 
'- pointments almost crusliing. Let us apply 
some further words of the above quoted 
writer in regard to Stoicism. * ' There is a 
way of looking at our poverty, our plain- 
ness of feature, our lack of mental bril- 
liance, our unpopularity, our mistakes, our 
physical ailments, that will make us modest, 
contented, cheerful, and serene. The blun- 
ders we make, the foolish things we do, the 
hasty words we say, though they, in a sense 
have gone out from us, yet once committed 
in the external world they should be left 
there ; they should not be brought back into 
the mind to be brooded over and become 
centres of depression and discourage- 
ment. ' ' Even the old philosopher realized 
that. How much more the Christian man, 
who knows that his God has taken our own 
weak nature, that He is in us and around 
us, and bids us cast all our care on Him I 
In the words of the great Apostle, forget- 
ting those things that are behind let us 
press on to the mark of our high calling. 



THE TEACHER 17 

Losing oneself in the high calling of shap- 
ing children to the image in which they are 
made, is a guarantee of success and happi- 
ness. The man that cannot lose himself is , 
for ever doomed to the woes of selfish- 
ness. 

Rules for teachers or children, like other 
formalities, count for very little, and in the 
long run for worse, if the man is not be- 
hind. But if there is the character worthy 
of the form, there cannot be too much stress 
laid upon the latter. The outward expres- 
sion is what first catches the attention, and 
is the natural medium for thoughts high or 
thoughts low. Let us remember how we 
ourselves were attracted or repelled by the 
face, the manner, or even by the dress of a 
teacher. How minutely did we observe 
every detail of gesture and of apparel, the 
clean hands and well-brushed clothes and 
polished shoes! There is no place in this 
world, I believe, where the manners of a 
gentleman count more for himself and for 
his generation than they do in the class- 
room. The well-modulated voice, the clear 
and distinct articulation, the ready smile 
indicative of humor and sympathy (not 
sarcasm) ; in fact, all the arts of good 



18 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

breeding, furthered by love, are not too 
much to spend in order to win the heart 
and open the mind of the child. So often 
some little trick of voice or of manner or 
of dress is the undoing of the teacher. 
I remember distinctly my own aver- 
sion to a man, which aversion arose at first 
solely through the spots and dandruff on 
his coat. 

Different peculiarities annoy different 
children. The unmanly caress, or effem- 
inate speech, as well as the harsh and 
brutal, is likely to annul the effect of many 
fine qualities. 

<< Why do you not get on with Mr. 
A? " 

C'A" was a painstaking, refined, and un- 
selfish master.) " He is too affectionate," 
answered a boy who, in every respect, was 
capable of appreciating the high qualities 
of his teacher. 

And then again one wonders at the ap- 
parent success of a man who is often harsh 
and brutal in voice or manner ; and a young 
teacher will be thus tempted to assume the 
hardness which he does not feel. Success 
of this sort is like the success of any other 
tyrant and is criminally out of place among 



THE TEACHER 19 

teachers of children. Benson, in his 
*' Upton Letters," notes, "A man who is an 
egotist and a bully finds rich pasturage 
among boys who are bound to listen to him 
and over whom he can tyrannize." This 
man, say I, is among those whose necks 
should be hung with millstones. In 
the m'idst of some tirade, suddenly one 
stops and imagines himself an observer 
passing the door of his own classroom: if 
he be a true man, shame overwhelms him, 
and this, perhaps, he takes no great pains 
to conceal ; perhaps, confesses at once, and 
afterwards, in the stillness of his own 
study, wonders what his pupils think of 
him. Then is his chance to step up 
higher on another stone thrown down 
from that great wall of pride that would 
hem in and darken the life of every 
man. 

If we could see ourselves as our boys see 
us, and if we did but realize what they ex- 
pect of us, we should be better men and 
better teachers. 

Valuable as is such a self-reflection from 
our pupils, our friends, or our enemies, 
there is, however, a truer gauge as well as 
a surer source of strength: 



20 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

** Blessed is the man whose strength is in Thee; 

In whose heart are Thy ways. 
Who going through the vale of misery 

Use it for a well : 
And the pools are filled with water, 

They will go from strength to strength 
And unto the God of Gods appeareth 

Every one of them in Zion. ' * 

Oh, for that spirit to-day which three 
hundred years ago inspired the great La 
Salle and filled France with bands of men, 
devoted heart and soul to teaching the 
child ! No hardship, no mental or spiritual 
discipline was too much for these men that 
they might win the children of their coun- 
try to straight thinking and living. It 
is interesting to note that La Salle was 
the first man to gather children and teach 
them in classes, and he was the first to 
bring men together into brotherhoods and 
community of life for the sake of this 
kind of work. While he was subject to the 
mistakes of the Church of his day, he kept 
himself and his men clean from intrigue, 
and won for his schools the lasting love of 
the best people in France. The tale of the 
devotion and phenomenal success of * ' The 



THE TEACHER 21 

Christian Brothers " is one that every 
teacher would be the better for reading. 
One of their customs shows the spirit in 
which they approached their work. After 
the daily morning devotions all assembled 
in their common room and confessed one 
to another the mistakes and failures of the 
preceding day. It is this spirit of self-a&- 
cusation, this habit of tracing failure to 
oneself rather than to the child, that not \y^ 
only keeps a man humble in his own life 
but gives him real power over the life of 
the child. 

But withal, let not a man forget that he 
is set to be a leader. Children are merci- 
less in their demands, and as soon as the 
teacher abdicates the position of leader, he 
is not only teased and overburdened, but, 
curiously enough, his pupils lose their 
respect. They fear and perhaps hate the 
bully, but they obey; while they play with 
a better man who does not assert himself. 

True leadership can come only to the 
strong, attractive, disciplined, and humble- 
minded who never allow their pupils to lose 
sight of the ideals of life. The leader must 
go before in all things that make a man, 
not only in striking points of personal 



22 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

character and good manners, but also in 
habits that conduce to bodily health and 
good temper as well as in habits of study 
and scholarship. 

Alas, how dependent on good digestion 
and good red blood are not only the healthy 
flights of our imagination and the ex- 
pression of high thoughts and ideals, but 
the happy conduct of the simplest routine ! 
The nerves of teachers must be steady; 
they must reflect health and happiness if 
they are to lead the young. President Eliot 
has said, I believe, ' ' The only man fit for a 
teacher is the young man or the man who 
never grows old." For the comfort of 
those of us who are growing old in our 
profession, let us remember Emerson's 
lines, 

** Spring still makes spring in the mind 
When sixty years are told ; 
Love makes anew the throbbing heart 
And we are never old. ' ' 

And the sage goes on to say, ' ' Get health. 
And the best part of health is fine disposi- 
tion. It is more essential than talent, even 
in the works of talent. Nothing will supply 



THE TEACHER 23 

the want of sunshine to peaches, and to 
make knowledge valuable, you must have 
the cheerfulness of wisdom." 

I fear that we shall be obliged to confess 
with President Hyde that Epicurus must 
be the first teacher of him who would teach. 
He says: "A teacher who works at such 
exhausting and narrowing work as in- 
structing thirty or forty restless children, 
and does not counteract it by plenty of play, 
is not only committing slow suicide, but he 
is stunting and dwarfing his nature so that 
every year will find him personally less fit 
to teach than he was the year before. . . . 
Play and people to play with are as neces- 
sary for a teacher as prayer for a preacher, 
or votes for a politician, a piano for a mu- 
sician, or a hammer for a carpenter. You 
simply cannot go on healthily, happily, 
hopefully, without it. . . . In short, to 
quote one who is our most genial apostle of 
Epicureanism, do you recognize and ar- 
range your life according to the principle 
that 

" The world is so full of a number of things, 
That I'm sure we should all be happy as 
kings! ' " 



24 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

Education in this country owes a great 
debt to President Hyde of Bowdoin Col- 
lege. His manly and clear insight into the 
needs of the present day is helping men 
everywhere and especially teachers to un- 
derstand the ideals and details of the pro- 
fession. 

In line with his remarks on this subject 
let us add our experience as to the helpful- 
ness of riding a hobby, if we do it unosten- 
tatiously. Outside intellectual interests 
that carry us away even into the clouds 
broaden our horizon, and bring us back to 
our classes with renewed mental brightness 
and vigor. When the mystic descends from 
his beautiful castle in the air, when the 
philosopher closes his book or blots his 
page, when the musician " hangs up the 
fiddle and the bow," when the forester 
comes out of the woods or the hunter out of 
the swamps and briars, one and all, they 
come from a new point of view after un- 
conscious mental growth, and each bright- 
ens his old routine with new lights. 

Let a man be not only well prepared in 
his subject far in advance of his pupils, but 
let him follow his own sweet pleasure in all 
that goes to make his own life full to over- 



THE TEACHER 25 

flowing. Indeed, no culture is too high, no 
attainment too exalted to bring into the 
classroom of the youngest child. We can 
never overestimate the silent influence 
upon the boy or girl of all that the teacher 
is in his own personality. Therefore, in 
this exercise of our right and duty. to work 
and to play, "the problem is," to quote 
again from President Hyde, ''one of pro- 
portion and selection, to know what to 
slight and what to emphasize. . . . The 
teacher should have a pretty clear idea of - 
what he means to do and be. That which 
is essential to this main end should be ac- 
cepted at all costs; that which hinders it 
should be rejected at all costs. . . . The 
teacher should learn to say, 'No!' to calls 
which are good in themselves, but are 
not good for him." Amateur theatricals, 
church fairs, Sunday-school work, avoid^; ' 
in fact, close attention to anything that re- 
quires the expenditure of the same nervous 
force required in our profession is to be 
shunned. 

As there is a danger in the wrong selec- 
tion of all such occupations in our leisure, 
so there is a danger of want of proportion in 
the attention which we give to the different 



26 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

parts of our work. There is such a thing 
as too much attention being paid to mark- 
ing and to accurate ranking by those whose 
business it is to teach large classes. If 
anything is to be shirked, shirk the least 
important so that we may emphasize the 
more important. "Do the thing that 
counts. Leave things that do not count un- 
done or get them done quickly. Remember 
that physical health, mental elasticity, and 
freshness and vivacity of spirits must be 
maintained at all costs in the interests of 
the school and the scholars no less than as 
a matter of imperative self-preservation. 
The wise teacher will say to himself, ' I 
must know the lessons I teach; I must 
do some reading outside; I must take 
an interest in my individual scholars; I 
must keep myself strong and happy and 
well; these are essential, and for the sake 
of these things I stand ready to sacri- 
fice all mere red tape; I stand ready to 
be misunderstood by good people who 
know nothing of the strain I am under; I 
stand ready to shirk and to slight minor 
matters when it is necessary to do so in 
order to do the main things well.' The 
larger a man's aims, provided he is able 



THE TEACHER 27 

measurably to realize them, the larger his 
influence ; but what does not further those 
aims must be politely ignored so far as 
they require time or energy." 

The child is the teacher's specialty and 
constant study; not simply children, and 
the ways of teaching and disciplining, but 
the child, each and every individual child 
committed to his care. The curse is not 
upon those who shall offend these little 
ones but upon '^ whomsoever shall offend 
one of these little ones"; so the blessing, 
the joy, the success of our work wait upon 
him who will '^ receive one of these little 
ones." He knows and calls each by name 
in his heart as well as with his lips. If one 
errs the ninety-nine must be left for a time, 
while he seeks the lost through all the pains 
and dangers to his own pride and ease. The 
only measure of such individual care is the 
measure of his own powers. The true 
leader goes before, and he holds his life 
in his hand ready to give with no reserve.^ 
This is the supreme glory of our profes- 
sion. 

Writes President Hyde: "Pour your- 
selves unreservedly, without stint or meas- 
ure, into the lives of your scholars. See 



/ 



28 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

things through their eyes ; feel keenly their 
joys and griefs. Be sure that you share in 
sympathy and helpfulness every task you 
lay upon them; that you rejoice in every 
success they achieve, and that you are even 
more sorry than they for every failure they 
make. Be a leader, not a driver, of your 
flock ; for to lead is Christ-like, to drive is 
unchristian. The difference, you see, be- 
tween the teacher who is a Christian and 
the one who is not, is not a difference of 
doctrine or ritual or verbal profession. It 
is a difference in the tone, temper, and 
spirit of the teacher's attitude toward the 
scholars. . . . The greatest difference be- 
tween teachers, after all, is that in this 
deepest sense some teachers are Christians 
and some are not. The teacher who is not a 
Christian according to this definition will 
work for reputation and pay, — will teach 
what is required and rule the school by 
sheer authority and force. Between teacher 
\i and scholar a great gulf will be fixed ; the 

only bridges across that gulf will be au- 
thority and constraint on the part of the 
teacher, fear and self-interest on the part 
of the pupils. Such a teacher will set 
tasks and compel the scholars to do them. 



THE TEACHER 29 

Here such a teacher's responsibility will 
end. 

" Precisely here, where the unchristian 
teacher's work ends, is where the Christian 
teacher's best work begins. Instead of im- 
posing a task on the scholars, the Christian 
teacher sets before scholars and teacher 
alike a task which they together must do ; 
the teacher is to help each scholar to do it 
and each scholar is to help the teacher to 
get this task done. It is a common work 
in which they are engaged. If they suc- 
ceed it is a common satisfaction ; if any in- 
dividual fails it is a common sorrow. The 
Christian teacher will be just as rigid in his 
requirements as the unchristian teacher, 
but the attitude toward the doing of it is 
entirely different. The unchristian teacher 
says to the scholars, ' Go and do that work ; 
I shall mark you and punish you, if you 
fail.' The Christian teacher says, ' Come, 
let us do this work together ; I am ready to 
help you in every way I can, and I want 
each of you to help me.' " 

While it is true, as we have reminded 
ourselves, that nothing unworthy will do to 
give the child, that no sacrifice is too great 
that makes the man or the woman more 



30 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

effective, so it is equally true that, no 
matter how great the gift we give, we shall 
find it again in our work. There is nothing 
that comes home to the true teacher more 
clearly as the years go on than this fact, 
guaranteed by the Great Teacher, namely, 
that just in proportion as a man gives his 
life he takes it again. There is ever a new 
joy as this or that difficult child turns more 
and more to the light that you are trying to 
hold, and begins really to take in what you 
are trying to give. And is it not true, my 
fellow teachers, is it not true that, in spite 
of a full share of disappointments and sor- 
rows, we have more than our share of the 
love of our fellows? 

And let us love in return; for he that 
loves much will not only sorrow much but 
rejoice much. This is life. 



/ 



n 

THE CHILD 

**T^7HAT is your subject? " asked a 
V V friend of a teacher in one of 
our large schools. '' Boys," was the quick 
reply. " I mean, what is your branch? " 
' ' Boys ! boys ! ! boys ! ! ! " was all the an- 
swer that the man would give. 

Every true teacher must feel that his 
*' subject " is always the child. Mathe- 
matics, history, the classics, or, whatever 
the study in hand, it is absolutely sec- 
ondary to the child. A master of boys 
whose success as a teacher and leader was 
a by-word in his generation, was frequently 
heard to say, '' Win the boy." He man- 
aged his great school largely through his 
personal influence on the individual mem- 
bers, both men and boys; public welfare 
sometimes seemed to suffer and even jus- 
tice seemed to halt in the plain endeavor to 
win this or that particular boy to a " better 

81 



32 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

state of mind." With all great teachers 
the same point is invariably emphasized as 
first and last and all the time the underlying 
principle of their work. It is not to win 
the child to oneself, but to win him to his 
■^ own '* better self." The winsomeness of 
some children is often just what stands in 
the way of our disinterested efforts for 
them as well as for each of their fellows, 
whereas the special and loving attention 
bestowed upon the commonplace and un- 
attractive, is not only one's duty to the 
individual, but it is a source of power for 
winning all. Nothing so impresses chil- 
dren with a teacher's competence as his 
patient attention and success with the slow 
and diffident child. The diffident child? 
How often is he the father of the brilliant 
man! That which marks a boy as out of 
the ordinary, the very element of his fu- 
ture greatness, is often the cause of his 
shyness and early reticence. Such chil- 
dren are generally slow to develop: they 
do not understand themselves: the only 
thing that they do seem to see plainly is 
that they do not fit their surroundings. 
Men and women long in our profession 
have noted how very many of their 



THE CHILD 83 

stupid scholars have attained to solid 
success, and some to real greatness. These 
coins, therefore, are worth the hunting, for 
they bear the " Image of the King." 

Let us remark just here, that the after 
success of this kind of a child is owing not 
only to native ability, but to these two 
facts: first, such a child, always taking a 
low place, is learning the inestimable 
lesson of humility; and, second, such a 
child is learning to overcome difficulties, to 
work hard and patiently in a way denied to 
the quicker and earlier mature. And, after 
all, are not these two chief ends of edu- 
cation? The power to work, and the hu- 
mility that fits one to take his right place 
in the brotherhood of man, go far toward 
opening to a man the treasures of the 
universe. 

Education, as we all know and generally 
forget, is not so much the putting in as the 
leading out: the leading out to a child's 
own consciousness all that is best in him, 
and so exhibiting the possibilities of his 
mind in such attractive guise as to arouse 
his every effort. Before good work must 
come the appetite, and before the appetite 
the ideal. The ideal is given shape, and 



34 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

the appetite aroused not only by the exhibi- 
tion of what the world holds outside the 
child, but also by showing to the child his 
own connection with all these things and 
his possible sovereignty over them. To 
an awakened mind or body every labor 
has its charm. Therefore, these three 
parts of education, the setting forth of the 
ideal, the sharpening of the appetite, and 
the drilling in the habits of work, though 
coming in the order named and having at 
different peri»ods in the child's life their 
relative importance, are all steps to the 
different stages in the same ascent, to be 
repeated again and again before each new 
landing. Early childhood is preeminently 
the time for inculcating what we call the 
idealistic elements of life; and, while this 
must always be the underlying feature of 
educating children, the next stage in the 
child we may call the hungry stage, which 
is to be duly used to lay in stores of beau- 
tiful and necessary forms, and to incul- 
cate habits of application and hard work. 
Here we may venture a general definition 
of education as " the process of proving 
to the child that work and not idleness is 
the normal state of happiness." We shall 



THE CHILD 35 

induce him to try, and so to prove to him- 
self that work begets appetite for more 
work. 

On these considerations, then, depends 
the attitude with which the teacher ap- 
proaches the child, and, therefore, the gen- 
eral character of the teacher's methods in 
training and discipline. 

Is it to put in something that is not 
there, or to bring out something that is 
there? Is it to present a subject or a les- 
son as something foreign to the child's ex- 
perience to be driven in, or is it to lead the 
child from its own conscious experience 
step by step to heights of imagination and 
practice before unknown? In discipline, is 
it to force the will to make a show of 
obedience, or is it to bring the child, even 
by severe punishment, if needs be, to his 
own better self? 

What more precise or more comprehen- 
sive expression may we use for the child 
in this view than the old familiar phrase, 
' ' the child of God ' ' ? When applied gen- 
erally, we mean by this, that the child is 
made in the image of perfection. We may 
say what we please about ' ' The Fall ' ' or 
man's natural degeneracy, yet it is the uni- 



36 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

versal testimony of those who look for it 
that in every normal child there is that 
Image, and a more or less ready response 
to its appeal. The chink to this inner 
divinity is sometimes very narrow, and the 
frightened little soul would feign hide. It 
is this conscious possibility, however, in 
the child that the true teacher sets himself 
to strengthen, and to which in some form 
or other he invariably appeals. We have 
all noted how a mother's faith in a boy 
gives her a hold that the father, as a rule, 
fails to acquire. And it is this very same 
kind of faith in and insight into a child's 
possibilities that gives a teacher the en- 
trance to the heart. We all remember, in 
our childhood, those who believed in us: 
a teacher here or there, one trained and ele- 
vated by a life of devotion, a friend, or per- 
haps a servant in the house. Whoever it 
was, their belief in us " led out ' ' the best 
of our hidden store, and went a long way 
toward our '* education.'* When we have 
said this we have said what comprises 
everything in the treatment of the child. 
Given the devotion on the part of the 
teacher and this idea of the child, then the 
different characters to be dealt with will 



THE CHILD 37 

suggest the different methods to be used. 
Older teachers know only too well the ab- 
solute failure that waits upon the ma- 
chinery of education uninspired by the 
personal touch ; as we also know the failure 
of trying to make one kind of a child out 
of another kind. The docile teachable 
youngster who easily takes one's point of 
view spoils us for the more obstinate or 
lazy; and then there comes the temptation 
of putting the screws of one's own making 
upon the wrongheadedness of the one or 
upon the flabby inertia of the other : there 
is pinching and squeezing, but not much 
moulding. It is also easy to forget that, 
as a rule, the more independent mind, the 
one harder to teach, is of the higher or 
creative class. It will be interesting later 
on to study the methods by which one may 
arouse this kind of a child to do his best. 
The danger is that we make it stupid by 
our own stupid driving. On the other 
hand, the quick response and rapid ad- 
vance of the first is often but catching 
the mere straws of education, and when 
bereft of the stimulus of the teacher and 
of school honors, — quick returns for small 
successes, — fails miserably ; it has not been 



38 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

taught to *' lead out " and marshal its 
own resources, but, on the contrary, has 
formed the habit of looking for friendly 
allies. While the one is growing into the 
habit of the slave, the other is growing into 
the habit of the nursling; both are losing 
in manliness and initiative force. 

The driver and the nurse are equally out 
of place in the school. When one sees the 
failures of some men who stood high at 
school, he is reminded of the old slave who 
came to his much-loved master after the 
war to beg him to make him work his own 
garden patch as he did " 'f o ' de wah. ' ' On 
the next plantation, they robbed the slave- 
driver whom they did not love. 

What President Hyde says of the college 
boy is, to a degree, true of the child : " No 
man can grow in character unless he is 
doing freely and gladly something which 
he likes to do — something into which he 
can put the whole energy of his will, the 
whole enthusiasm of his heart. . . . We 
can never make men out of the boys who 
come to us, unless in some form or other 
we give them a career in which to work out 
freely what is in them. Wherever pre- 
scription and paternalism undertake to 



THE CHILD 39 

domineer the life of the student, there we 
are sure to find either lawlessness, re- 
bellion, and all manner of boisterous mis- 
chief, or else the product of such an insti- 
tution will be a lot of good-for-nothing, 
effeminate namby-pamby weaklings." 

As a man proceeds in the work of edu- 
cation, he has less and less confidence in 
the line between " clever " and '' dull " 
children. An old teacher was wont to say 
that, in his opinion, there is very little 
difference in actual ability to learn; that 
the difference lies mostly in the desire and 
the will. But here there is a wide differ- 
ence, and it is our task to arouse and direct 
the desire, while we strengthen and steady 
the will. There is no such thing as the 
' * average child ' ' : each one claims our spe- 
cial attention for its own individual wants. 
The '' ninety and nine " will not stray 
while we seek the one lagging or lost. Yet 
we note that the Master left them that He 
might make the flock whole once more, — 
'' that they all may be one." Therefore, 
there is no such thing either as the '' ex- 
ceptional child, ' ' in the sense that he can be 
saved alone, that his *' leading " is to end 
anywhere but as one of the great family of 



t^ 



40 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

men. This idea should permeate the whole 
process of education. The earlier a child 
learns that he is but one of a great com- 
pany, that he is not an exception, but a rule, 
the better for him. The earlier a boy 
learns to take his bitters and his sweets 
with his fellows, the better and happier for 
him. Children are naturally gregarious ; it 
is the state in which we all find our great- 
est happiness, and the child from the start 
should be trained to take his place. This 
natural joy of companionship is one of a 
teacher's best means to arouse the desire 
and steady the will. How often we have 
seen the stupid listless boy ^' wake up " 
when thrown with others! It is not only 
the competition, it is the play of number- 
less and unnamed characteristics aroused 
by the mere companionship. We have 
here, then, both an end and a means of 
education. 

To press this point still farther, not only 
is the child to be educated in that balance 
of mental attainments which go to make 
the boy an educated man, able to hold his 
own in the world, and the girl an educated 
woman, able to hold her own in the world, 
but the particular ability of each is to be 



THE CHILD 41 

discovered and so guided as to enable each 
to fit best in that place in the family of 
mankind to which he may be called. A 
careful judgment, therefore, in regard to 
the material before one is a grave responsi- 
bility for the teacher. A skilled workman 
must be a good judge of material. Minds 
must be studied and known if minds are 
to be trained. The blind cannot be taught 
to draw, nor the dumb to sing. The ques- 
tion is first, what this mind is, not what it 
ought to be; the actual material that gen- 
erations of neglect, or idleness, or wrong 
methods or dull homes, or money-loving 
cities, or any other form of stunted life 
may send forth ; or, on the other hand, the 
actual material that generations of refine- 
ment and intellectual effort have produced 
in the child before you. In any and in 
every case, the child must be studied and 
its best side reached. Broadly speaking, 
the elective system cannot be too soon or 
too wisely begun. While we are constrain- 
ing the child to the exertion of what seem 
to be its weaker faculties, leading it with 
all the power we may to a habit of over- 
coming difficulties, the special gift, if there 
be one, must never be lost. Everything 



42 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

will be better done if opportunity is wisely 
given for even the baby to choose what she 
likes best. The instinct to be alone with 
nature or with books or with the one 
friend, is to be recognized and turned to 
the best advantage. The power to be a 
great leader often develops from these 
very habits of close and quiet communing. 
Modern methods of education are in dan- 
ger at some points of denying this chance 
to the child, while at others there is a fool- 
ish latitude. Some of us have seen the 
listless schoolboy, the " butt " of his class, 
rouse up all his faculties when he has dis- 
covered something which he can do well. 
The carpenter's bench, more than once, 
has helped to open the mind to the contem- 
plation of the highest themes. One little 
eminence attained gives a new view and 
opens new possibilities. Happiness floods 
the heart, and the heavy mind becomes, in 
a sense, a new creature ; all work becomes 
easier and is better done, because one thing 
is well done. It is the well-rounded spe- 
cialist who has learned to work even under 
difficulties that makes the happiest as well 
as the most useful citizen. " Jack of all 
trades " becomes " master of none," and 



THE CHILD 43 

this '' master of none " never knows the 
joy of doing a thing really well, as he 
never knows the full joy of that sweet 
interdependence between those who give 
and those who receive. He tries to be all- 
sufficient in himself. But " to give and to 
take " — this is breath,. the breath in and the 
breath out — this is life as well as education. 

In a large degree this is the life and the 
reward of the true teacher, for he gets as 
much as he gives. Year after year, day 
after day, as a man goes to his class in the 
same old room to give and to hear the 
same old lessons, not only are the faces 
ever new, but for him there is an ever- 
growing faith in the hidden treasures of 
the child. Every day there is the old 
enemy in much the same guise, but every 
day we are learning his tricks and new 
methods of attack, and every day we find a 
new treasure in a fresh breath of truth and 
purity from the child. We are the first 
recipients of what we "■ lead out " from 
this inexhaustible child. 

Such, then, is the child, and such is his 
destiny. He is now the " Child of God," 
fresh from the hands of his Creator, with 
all the possibilities of happiness and use- 



44 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

fulness; and tlie fulfilment of his destiny 
is largely in our hands. 

All our methods, therefore, should tend 
to bring home to the child the truth of his 
inheritance, and so to fit him not only for 
his own battle against *' the world, the 
flesh, and the devil," but for his fight in the 
ranks for the spread of that Kingdom of 
Love which is to bring deliverance to the 
oppressed and freedom to those that are 
bound. 



in 

THE NUESEEY 

IF it comes to a choice of " bringing 
up " the child according to some pre- 
conceived notion or of " letting him grow 
up," by all means choose the latter. If 
I were a child endowed with the light of 
my present experience, I should say with 
David, ** Let us fall now into the hand of 
the Lord; for His mercies are great: and 
let me not fall into the hand of man." It 
is evident, however, that more children are 
spoiled by neglect than by over care. Our 
object is, therefore, to indicate the lines on 
which the early years should be trained in 
order best to prepare the child for going 
away to school. Wise training rather 
than much training, wisdom rather than 
zeal, is our watchword in all this nurturing 
of the springs of life. The problem is al- 
ways the same, though, if anything, more 

45 



46 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

important in the nursery than in the 
school ; and the problem is, ' ' to bring out 
all that is best in the child to all good 
uses." It is not, therefore, to '' bring 
up " the little one to something great, but 
to " bring out " the inborn image of per- 
fection by a wise nurture of growth. 

This nurture cannot be started too soon. 
When one attempts to trace to its source 
some habit for good or evil, he generally 
becomes lost in the earliest reaches of his 
memory. Our Roman brother says, ' ' Give 
me the child till he is twelve and he is 
mine always." 

Discipline meets us on the very thresh- 
old; as to this, let us remember that the 
exalting of good is better than the blaming 
of bad. Scolding and punislmient can 
never take the place of happy surroundings 
and uplifting example. However, a child 
must be led to strict obedience even at the 
cost of painful punishment. A light switch 
quickly and lovingly and effectively ad- 
ministered saves much unhappiness. Dif- 
ferent methods of bringing about this 
obedience in children will apply to differ- 
ent children, but for all, the personality of 
the father, mother, or nurse is the one thing 



THE NURSERY 47 

needful ; such a personality as never leaves 
a sting, but brings home and finishes every 
punishment with words and deeds of love. 
Discipline may have but one object, and 
that is to raise the divine in the child, and 
not the devil. Deceit and lying are the 
Devil's clothes for the little one, and some 
children they fit so naturally as to demand 
great patience and wisdom in substituting 
the garment of truth. 

If there is a necessity for the teacher to 
be truthful, pure, and unselfish, there is 
greater necessity for the nurse, be she 
mother or servant. There is not only the 
direct infliience through discipline and ex- 
ample, but there is that mysterious spirit- 
ual influence that the elder has over the 
younger and unformed character. The 
child catches not only manners and ways, 
but traits of character, so that the ex- 
pression of its face will often grow very 
like to that of a nurse. 

Next to the personality of the nurse we 
shall have a care to all that the little one 
sees and hears. Pleasant faces, attractive 
pictures, etc., are, however, more common 
than wise words. '' Little pitchers have 
long ears," and many a child has learned 



/ 



48 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

in the nursery the habit of unkind criticism 
and gossip which he carries with him 
through life. Just here we touch what 
seems the first principle in the education 
of children and all young people, the prin- 
ciple of faith. 

Now faith, as a principle of life, to state 
it very simply, is the habit of mind which 
first believes and then tests the belief in 
practice; the habit of mind which, drilled 
in grammar (so to speak), through good 
example, grasps intuitively the best of 
man's experience for its own use. Original 
investigation and initiative are the surer 
for practical result with faith as a basis 
for individual experience. Many men, emi- 
nent scholars, lecturers, and preachers of 
great power, have failed with children for 
lack of that definiteness which not only 
carries conviction to the mind of the child, 
but calls out faith. 

It was a wise man as well as a poet who 
sang: 

** Blessed is the man . . . that sitteth not in 

the seat of the scornful. 
But his delight is in the law of the Lord ; 
And in His law doth he meditate (exercise 

himself) day and night. 



THE NURSERY 49 

** And he shall be like a tree planted by the riv- 
ers of water that bringeth forth his fruit in 
due season; 
His leaf also shall not wither ; and whatsoever 
he doeth shall prosper. ' ' 

Moreover, the supposition on which we 
"began and continue these reflections is that 
those who teach in the nursery or in school 
should first have faith themselves in the 
child; and, second, by their own truth and 
sincerity teach the child in turn to have 
faith in them. They are to believe that 
the best is somewhere hidden away in the 
heart of every child, and then to work out 
this belief in every act of discipline or en- 
couragement in such a way as to win the 
trust and confidence of the child to them- 
selves and to the law that they teach. Faith 
in a teacher and in the law which he 
teaches will lay in the young a foundation 
on which to build the finest structure of ex- 
perience, whether in science or practice. 

Faith? We have sometimes been so 
frightened at the grotesque forms taught 
in the name of faith for the purpose of sat- 
isfying human greed for power that we 
have fled to the opposite extreme only to 
find that the truest agnostic, in his search 



50 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

for truth, arrives at the point where every 
child should start : " I knoiu little or noth- 
ing; every step forward in knowledge but 
broadens my view of those facts which I 
must believe in order to live." When we 
speak of faith, therefore, we mean, in this 
connection a habit of mind ; and something 
even more than this, even that idea of faith 
which we gather from St. Paul's frequent 
use, a " soul-attitude " which involves the 
whole person, and directs the whole intel- 
lectual growth. Nothing could be more 
unwise than to allow such a faith to be 
bound within the limits of word formulas, 
call them what you please. Equally un- 
wise is the teacher to forego the use of 
such formula in teaching this element of 
trust or faith, not only as a starting-point 
for the child, but in directing the intellect 
to the most practical method for arriving 
at results for itself. A creed is not a wall, 
but a path leading out into limitless ad- 
venture. No one has improved on the plan 
of the great apostle Paul,* " For I deliv- 
ered unto you first of all that which also 
I received." Then after a clear statement 
of what he had received comes the equally 
clear statement of his own experience, and 

* 1 Cor. XV. 



THE NURSERY 51 

then the appeal to the experience of his 
pupils, ' ' If Christ be not raised, your faith 
is vain; ye are yet in your sins "; three 
equally important witnesses, with which to 
confront every child, in their proper order ; 
the witness of the fathers, as coming with 
the authority and weight of one who has 
made it his own, and so applied it as to 
stimulate experience to be its own witness. 
Indeed, this is the method of the Master 
Himself all through His teaching; the 
" witness of John," the ^' witness " of His 
own works, and the '^ witness " of the 
hearts of His hearers, or, as it is 
summed up in another place (S. John iii: 
32) by the Forerunner himself, " "What 
he hath seen and heard, that he testifieth," 
and ' ' He that receiveth his testimony hath 
set to his seal that God is true." 

Faith, therefore, may be called both the 
method and the chief object to be attained 
in teaching the child. As one would sup- 
pose, it is the nature of the child to trust 
and to take things on trust; and, while we 
make use of this faculty, it is all-important 
to lead it out, or educate it, on sane and 
natural lines. The elder cannot be too 
careful in fulfilling every promise and in 



52 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

refraining from all threats ; cannot be too 
careful in setting an example of trust and 
faith in their fellows ; cannot be too careful 
in avoiding all pretence, and effort to fool 
the child. The religious elements of edu- 
cation do not enter distinctively into the 
scope of this paper, but let us note here 
that so-called religious faith cannot be 
taught except through faith in man ; ' ' first 
that which is natural, then that which is 
spiritual." The child drinks in its faith in 
God through mother and nurse. Indeed, 
faith in God and faith in man and (may we 
not say?) in nature are one. Long expe- 
rience in the country districts of New Eng- 
land has burned into my mind some dread- 
ful pictures of faithlessness. I doubt if 
darkest Africa can match instances of the 
devilish natures nurtured in some of our 
New England homes where *' experience " 
rather than ' * faith ' ' has been for genera- 
tions the religious watchword. Deserted 
farms and childless homes bear witness to 
the failure of the stream of life. No trust 
in God or man, no trust in nature except 
what a man may win by his own meagre 
jefforts, has produced a condition of society 
and a type of individual truly appalling. 



THE NDRSERY 5S 

Shut within itself the heart of man, nat- 
urally trustful and teachable, has become 
so small and hard as to seem almost inhu- 
man. Self-will has become its God, and 
selfishness its rule of life, even where some 
of the old formulas of faith have a nominal 
dominion. The very soil is hungry for the 
seeds of faith. The Irish and the French- 
Canadian, trained on different lines, come 
into the waste places, and the old house is 
full of children, and the old barn full of 
plenty. Every quackery has also found in 
this country a ready soil; so barren is the 
heart that the man whose faith is roused 
by a bread pill or a Mother Eddy goes out 
to a newer and happier life. Works with- 
out faith are veritable grave-clothes; this, 
too, in the land whose watchword once was 
*' justification by faith." Do let us read 
the signs of the times, that our children 
may have life in abundance. 

Faith being, therefore, the main proposi- 
tion for the nursery, Responsibility is the 
first corollary. The child who is brought 
up to believe that he is a child of God 
made for some fine purpose and one of a 
great family, naturally breathes the spirit 
of responsibility. Eegularity in all the 



54 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

small duties of the home is essential, as well 
as order and obedience. There is but one 
commandment that has a promise all its 
own: namely, " Honor thy father and thy 
mother." Obedience as a principle and 
habit of life is rarely learned except in the 
nursery or in the hard life of the barracks. 
Experience soon teaches that submission is 
expedient, but expediency is a weak mas- 
ter. It is the unswerving and loyal sub- 
mission of the well-trained child that 
brings success to the man, the life ' ' long ' ' 
in usefulness and happiness if not in years. 
Responsibility, however, has its back- 
ground: namely, the free and happy 
growth of the child's own tastes and pow- 
ers. A wise freedom to choose his own way 
is absolutely essential, as well as the chance 
to bear the results of his own mistakes. As 
soon as joossible the child should be held 
responsible for the care of his own posses- 
sions — his room, pets, books, or toys. As 
a child grows older, every added privilege 
should carry with it an added duty. Great, 
strong men who have fought and won their 
battle in life bring their boys from the nur- 
sery to the school with the remark, " I 
have had to work for everything from my 



THE NURSERY 55 

boyhood, and I want my boy to have what- 
ever he wishes." We look at the boy and 
we see the stamp of helplessness, and our 
hearts sink. If we were wise, we would 
answer, ' ' Then, sir, please take him home 
again; you would deprive your boy of the 
very thing that made you a man." 

The child in the nursery knows not what 
the word '' responsibility " means, but it is 
remarkable how soon the sense of it grows 
under the proper influence. Indeed, the 
older one takes so naturally to a share in 
the care of the younger, and in the other 
burdens of the nursery, that with some 
there is a danger of blighting their free 
and light-hearted joys. There are two 
sides to the answer of the question, ' ' Dost 
thou not think that thou art bound to be- 
lieve and to do as your sponsors promised 
for you ? ' ' — the ' ' yes, verily ' ' and the ' ' I 
heartily thank ' ' : there must be the yoke, 
but it must be easy and light; there must 
be joy in the nursery. 

The imagination furnishes a large part 
of the material for the life of a happy 
nursery, and it should have free play. In 
that wonderful fairyland in which most of 
us have lived, the hours are not only happy, 



56 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

but they are fraught with deep truths of 
life. Never mind the borderland between 
truth and fancy; that is " a secret " of the 
little one and will clear itself without the 
aid of the " grown up," if we are just 
to ourselves. Dwarf the imagination and 
you impair the power of vision, and 
weaken the grasp of faith; in other words, 
you dwarf the whole realm of the intellect 
and heart. Let the fairyland extend on 
into life, in poetry and prose, leading to 
the higher and maturer flights of the imag- 
ination which open so many vistas of truth. 
Hard facts come only too soon, and they 
are not half so hard if we may still have 
our dreams. 

'' Eeading without tears " becomes an 
actual fact for the child whose mind has 
been somewhat ordered by the nursery. 
Six or seven is old enough to begin this 
more serious business. Two little boys 
who knew their alphabets came to me for 
their first lessons in reading. We sat at 
the window overlooking the playground 
and the pond. I made up a little story of 
what we saw, while they watched the main 
facts being printed in words of one sylla- 
ble. They soon took up the printing for 



THE NURSERY 57 

themselves from my dictation and their 
own suggestions. Each day, while we 
added new matter, we read the old. Their 
interest being aroused by making the ex- 
ercise a growth from their own little lives ; 
their eyes, their ears, and their memories 
being called on to do their parts, it was 
wonderful how soon and happily they got 
over the difficulties of the start. 

While it is a laudable eifort to make 
lessons attractive and to give to learning 
its true place in the natural and happy de- 
velopment of a child's mind, lessons are 
not play. The power to work and concen- 
trate thought is the end in view, and this 
can be attained only by work and concen- 
tration. The habit of patient close work 
without prompting from a teacher cannot 
be cultivated too early. The Kindergarten 
does not seem to accomplish this result. 
Either we do not know how to work it, or 
it is unsuitable to our American life of 
independence. The product of the Kinder- 
garten, so far as I have seen it, is a men- 
tal dependence and a lack of real industry 
that are destructive to scholarship. The 
ordinary nursery school is little better. 
It is true, the child has more initiative, but 



58 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

the detention for a certain number of 
hours, the waiting before an open book till 
so much time has passed or so many other 
children have been ' ' heard, " is a dreadful 
performance. Moreover, instead of work- 
ing out alone and undisturbed short por- 
tions, the child forms the habit of turning 
to the teacher for explanation of every 
little difficulty. The whole plan should be 
different. For subjects that require close 
attention there should be a quiet room. 
The limit of attendance should be not time, 
but work accomplished, and the little one 
should be encouraged in every way to work 
quickly and accurately. As has been well 
said, " The first lesson of education is the 
lesson of getting down to hard work and 
doing the work thoroughly." 

This whole subject is one of such im- 
portance that I take the liberty here of 
quoting a few paragraphs from a paper 
of Dr. Briggs read before the Department 
of Superintendence at Chicago, February, 
1901 : ' ' What threatens our early educa- 
tion nowadays is the amusement and va- 
riety theory. Working upward from the 
Kindergarten, it bids fair to weaken the 
intellect and to sap the will. A well-known 



THE NURSERY 59 

teacher in Boston had no difficulty in pick- 
ing out the members of his school who had 
begun their education in the Kindergarten; 
and he picked them out because of a weak- 
ness in their intellectual processes. There 
are exceptions, and notable ones ; and there 
is, as everybody knows, a lovely side to the 
Kindergarten: but the danger of the Kin- 
dergarten principle is felt by many a 
teacher who hardly dares hint at it. An 
elective system in college gives a noble 
liberty to the man who has been so trained 
that he can use his liberty wisely; but 
when an elective system goes lower and 
lower into our schools till it meets children 
who have been amused through the years 
in which they should have been educated, 
what chance have these children for the 
best thing in education? 

** ' On a huge hill, 
Cragged and steep, truth stands; and he that 
will 
Reach her about must, and about it go, 
And what th' hill's suddenness resists, win so.' 

" That I am not fighting shadows or 
knocking down men of straw, the testi- 
mony of a hundred teachers and parents 



60 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

makes clear. The amusement theory, 
starting in an honest and benignant desire 
to show children the beauty of the world 
about them and to rouse their interest in 
study, especially in the study of nature, 
may end with the sacrifice of strength in 
the pulpit and of truth in the teacher ; may 
become a sweetmeat theory, giving the 
children food which debilitates and de- 
ranges the organs that crave it. 

* * Certainly the education of boys should 
not be a bore and a bugbear, nor should 
it ignore culture. Yet the culture should 
not crowd out training; it should rather 
be atmospheric; it should come to the boy 
from the finer, maturer, and more sensitive 
character of his teacher; it should take 
little visible or tangible part in the school 
programme ; it should pervade the whole. ' ' 

Let us consider some lines of teaching in 
the nursery. For the imbibing of ideas, 
pictures, accompanied with story-telling, 
are the simplest forms. The child soon 
learns to express itself in the same way, 
by telling stories in its turn and using its 
own pencil. When reading begins, spelling 
begins. The habit of observation should 
be cultivated by making the spelling lesson 



THE NURSERY 61 

consist of words chosen from the reading 
and spelled and pronounced by syllables: 
words missed should be written and 
learned for next day, so that both eye and 
ear are trained to supplement each other 
in the memory. Correct and distinct pro- 
nunciation and intonation in reading are 
the very elements for lack of which many 
go through life handicapped. The writing 
from memory and imagination of small 
essays may be done with great advantage 
at an early stage, as well as copying short 
bits of simple prose and poetry, sometimes 
to be learned by heart and carefully recited. 
Writing from dictation should be added as 
soon as practical. 

Geography is an excellent nursery study. 
The first ideas may be built about the geog- 
raphy of the home, but for serious study 
the globe is indispensable. The child can- 
not begin too early to look at all things 
in their mutual relations. The mere round- 
ness of the globe impresses itself upon the 
young imagination in a way never to be 
forgotten. And in these days of travel it 
is easy to keep constantly in view the rela- 
tions to each other of different nations, as 
well as of different lands. The background 



62 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

of the Geography should always be the life 
of the people. There are phases of the 
history and life of every people that are 
of intense interest to the nursery child. As 
they progress from one country to another, 
with the map and the globe always before 
them, the few names of principal localities 
being memorized in conjunction with a 
study of their inhabitants, gives the whole 
subject plenty of life. The drawing of 
maps and filling in of blank outlines and 
the writing out their impressions of the life 
of the people, are excellent exercises and 
entirely practical from the start. 

Arithmetic, of course, is indispensable. 
Mental drill is the main thing: to see that 
the child understands the simple properties 
of numbers, then to lead him to the point 
of answering very rapidly, building up, and 
learning perfectly as he builds, his multi- 
plication table. This can be driven home 
and fixed permanently by varying ques- 
tions on simple factors, divisors, quotients, 
and dividends. The young mind will al- 
ways avoid the use of names and defini- 
tions if possible, but should carefully be 
trained to the contrary. The written work 
should coincide with the oral and should be 
done as far as practical without help. 



THE NURSERY 63 

The spirit to be fostered is that of the 
youngster who, after laboriously studying 
out and completing his first little problem, 
and finding that his answer corresponded 
with that in the book, came triumphantly 
to his teacher with the remark, ' ' The book 
is right." 

History should not be introduced till the 
child's mind is stocked with hero stories 
of great men. This gives the appetite ; and 
as these men appear there is something 
tangible on which to build the outlines of 
history. Not only is the interest awakened 
and the memory stimulated, but the young 
heart is early filled with ideals which 
should live. Eecitations in History should 
be varied, as in Geography and Reading, 
by writing and telling orally the substance 
of the lesson. There is absolutely no way 
to acquire facility of expression except by 
practice. The answer, '' I know it, but I 
can't say it," should never be admitted as 
evidence. Half -answers pieced out by the 
teacher, guesses, and inarticulate mum- 
bling are not to be tolerated. Let the lan- 
guage be as simple as need be, but require 
a finished thought expressed both in the 
writing and in the oral exercise. Such care 
in expression is worth while in itself, and 



64 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

at the same time it produces care in thought 
and stimulates originality. It is wonder- 
ful how soon the child begins to think for 
himself. The point is to foster that de- 
sire on healthy and helpful lines, and so 
prepare the little one for his emancipation 
from the nursery into the world of school. 

Fortunate indeed are those little ones 
whose minds and hearts turn naturally to 
music. Not only to them should be given 
every chance, but for all there should be 
place found for training in singing. In 
no way perhaps can high ideals and fel- 
lowship be so easily and delightfully taught 
as in music. 

While the love of flowers and of all 
things beautiful in nature and in art is an 
important thing to cultivate in the nur- 
sery, children are different in their capac- 
ities for such things, and great care should 
be taken not to quench the delight in 
beauty by a too careful analysis, or by its 
association with distasteful work. Open 
the way for discovery rather than force 
the child along a beaten track. A very few 
subjects suffice for the work of the nur- 
sery school, and a very few hours for its 
accomplishment. From one to three hours 
a day is the limit of detention for children 



THE NURSERY 65 

between the ages of seven and twelve, and 
these hours should be liberally provided 
with recesses. The custom of sending the 
little ones to school in order to get them 
out of the way or to keep them quiet is a 
menace to education. They may learn to 
be comparatively quiet, but they surely do 
learn to be idle. One of the objects of this 
early training, namely that of concentra- 
tion, is completely defeated. In a large 
majority of cases, the first three or four 
years of a young child's experience in the 
school-room had much better have been 
left out or spent rather in the fields. The 
child left alone will find lots of objects 
which stimulate thought and reflection, 
whereas the child hemmed in by the walls 
of a room and faced by a distasteful book 
is simply being robbed of his natural heri- 
tage of permission to grow. 

It must ever be borne in mind that these 
years are the years when memory is most 
retentive, and no care is too great to in- 
sure the memorizing of beautiful forms of 
thought in prose and poetry, the full intent 
of which will dawn only upon the maturer 
years. It is the age for firmly planting 
ideals, so that the appetite may be whetted 
and the desire for work aroused. 



IV • 

SCHOOL. 

HAPPY the man who can look back 
to his school with love, the fra- 
grance of whose early days never passes 
wholly from his life. We do not mean 
merely that sentiment that wraps the early 
life of most men, but we mean that solid 
happiness that lives on from the boy's life 
to the man's — the happiness that grows 
only when the life is growing, the kind of 
happiness that is ever the test of the true 
school. For, after all, education is but 
healthy growth toward perfection; and 
healthy growth is the only state of solid 
content. Education, in its broadest sense, 
is, as has been well said, ' ' the transmission 
of life from the living to the living." 

To the young everything is alive, even 
the ^' stocks and stones " of the familiar 
wayside, — each has its message of life ; and 
it is to the school that we look to convey 

66 



SCHOOL 67 

that message truly. Memory is the pre- 
dominant faculty of the child, and it is 
with amazement that the man considers the 
mass of material stored in those early 
years of light and sunshine. Therefore, it 
is of the first importance that the school 
should still carry on, with the happiness 
of the home, the task of proposing the 
highest and best things to be remembered, 
— such scenes of life, such words of life 
as one should want always to remember. 
The home, the nursery, and the school are 
the places for setting up ideals. The uni- 
versity has comparatively little to do with 
that side of education. As one of the great- 
est of school-masters used often to say, 
' ' The first duty of a school is to raise and 
hold high the standard of life." 

In the early days of one of our great 
schools, it was my privilege to be present 
at a certain '' prize day." After a few 
words from the head-master, one of the 
trustees gave from his own experience a 
short account of the inception of the school. 
During their family drives over that beau- 
tiful country they used constantly to pass 
a certain field which greatly attracted an 
invalid sister. She would playfully re- 



68 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

mark that some day she was going to buy 
that field and build a home there. From 
this the custom grew of calling it '' The 
Field Home." After the sister's death, 
this field became in their eyes a sacred 
spot, and when the opportunity presented 
itself of helping to start a boys' school, 
they bought the field and gave it as the 
home of the school. Then this gentleman 
went on to draw a very true and simple 
picture of what a school should be : first, a 
home, giving all the individual and per- 
sonal care of a home, developing all those 
finer traits which grow only in the sunshine 
of love and fellowship; second, a field for 
the wider use of all the powers of the boy 
looking to his manhood in the world — a 
field where he may try out himself with his 
fellows in preparation for the larger field 
of the world. The words of this trustee 
found a ready echo in the heart of more 
than one, as the years were soon to prove. 
No better word could be coined to describe 
a true school, and few men have so realized 
their hopes as those who built their wall 
upon that '^ Field-Home." 

For the boy or girl at school, nothing in 
nature, nothing in art, nothing in man, can 



SCHOOL 69 

be too beautiful, if it is ever borne in mind 
that education to robust and beautiful man- 
hood is the end in view, and not the lust of 
the eye or the pride of life. Luxury and all 
that goes to weaken life work is absolutely 
out of place in school, for, as we shall note 
more plainly below, work, in its broadest 
sense, work, and the joy of work, is the 
business of School. 

While every detail for the accomplish- 
ment of the perfection of oitr ' ' home ' ' in 
order to plant in the memory the right kind 
of ideal, and to give to each and every boy 
a full measure of its life; while every de- 
tail for the rounding out of our field in or- 
der to give play to every faculty that makes 
for preparation to a world of fellowship; 
while every detail should be carefully 
worked up, let us consider the subject in 
a more general way under two main heads, 
which we may call " the man " and " the 
wall." 

During this inquiry is always the under- 
lying question of the end of it all. To 
quote from the great head-master of Up- 
pingham, Edward Thring: " The practical 
question is, what process will turn a man 
out best fitted to do life work, and enable 
mankind as a race to do their best? As 



70 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

definite a question, as the question, what 
process is necessary to make a deal-box? 
And the first answer to this question is 
equally definite and clear: that process, 
namely, which best produces power in man 
himself, and makes him most capable of 
employing his faculties in the best way. 
This gives a starting-point at once. Power 
in a man's self is the work of education; 
and how to produce it the inquiry." 

This, naturally brings us to the consid- 
eration of the man in '^ school." Per- 
haps no one has better demonstrated the 
power of the " man " in '' school " than 
Edward Thring himself. Called to an old 
foundation with centuries of dead life be- 
hind, under a board of trustees who wanted 
nothing else, and vigorously opposed all 
change; in a part of England most unat- 
tractive ; in a sleepy and hostile town gov- 
erned in obstinate ignorance and disregard 
of the laws of health, — the " man " rose 
above it all; rose above even a series of 
fever epidemics which nearly swamped the 
school ; and he carried off the whole estab- 
lishment of more than three hundred boys 
and masters to an empty hotel by the sea. 
He refused to return till all had been set 



SCHOOL 71 

right. The ' ' man ' ' finally triumphed over 
every obstacle of nature and stupidity of 
man, and at his death among his boys left 
a school the like of which in loyalty and 
fine manly tone, in scholarship and morals, 
England has never surpassed. 

First, then, in the character of any 
school is the character of the head-master- 
and of his associates. Every one who has 
had anything to do with boys in * ' school ' ' 
knows that the most potent force to rule is 
public opinion; and it seems fair to say 
that the private characters of the masters 
go far, very far, toward moulding public 
opinion. "We have discussed at some 
length in a former chapter the '' person- 
ality of the teacher, ' ' and all that we wish 
to do here is to recall the conclusions there 
stated and to apply them to the forming 
and maintaining of a tone in '' school." 
The subtle influence of character in the in- 
dividual is what produces that subtle fac- 
tor of life in a community which we call 
** tone "; and this is the unseen guide of 
public opinion. The character of the head- 
master, we might almost say, determines 
this character and tone of the school. He 
is the heart. He can perhaps buy the head. 



72 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

but he must be tlie heart which sustains the 
flow of life all through the school. Inspir- 
ing fear in the hearts of evildoers, and 
courage in the hearts of the weak, while he 
walks alone and above all, his door is open 
to every kind of boy and man with the 
surety of justice and mercy. 

One wrote, at fifty, of his old school and 
its head : " I suppose I was about as hope- 
less a boy as any who ever attended — ^but I 
don't believe that there was ever a boy 
there who had more loving care and sym- 
pathy extended to him by . I did not 

appreciate it then as I should have done, 
and I was unworthy and ungrateful, but 
somehow the older I grow the closer to me 
seems to come his love and never-failing 
kindness, and, while it did me little appar- 
ent good at the time, its influence has fol- 
lowed me through life and always for the 

making of a better man. was the best 

man and the truest friend who ever came 
into my life. His words to me, spoken in 
his study, fell then upon listless ears, but 
unwittingly I took them deep into my heart 
and their echo has come to me in many an 
hour when I needed just such help." 

Such a head-master wins the best of men 



SCHOOL 73 

and boys to rally round him for tlie best 
and liighest interests, and there is no tell- 
ing how far such an influence goes. He 
draws his masters around him not only 
with cords of a common work, but in cords 
of a common life. He is the one to forge 
all the links of different metal into a living 
chain with which to draw his school ever 
to higher levels. Without this " unity in 
itself," little definite impression is left 
on the boy ; and, moreover, power is wasted 
and perhaps despised. 

Public opinion, rightly formed and sus- 
tained, is therefore, perhaps, the chief task 
of the head-master ; a task, however, which 
involves many other tasks. I shall never 
forget the effect upon myself and my com- 
panions of the finality with which our old 
master would say, ' ' That is one of our tra- 
ditions, " or, " That is fixed. ' ' He himself 
sat before us as the personification of 
''tradition," as he said, " We have never 
given in to that in this place," or, " That 
was settled years ago." 

It is also directly through the head- 
master that the life of a school is impressed 
upon the individual boy; that the boy is 
happy and proud to be appealed to as a 



74 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

member of a great school, on whom the 
privilege develops of handing on what he 
has received. 

The power of the solid character of such 
a * ' man ' ' comes out in every detail of his 
contact with his boys ; the seasonable word 
is his readiest tool, not only for influenc- 
ing the individual directly, but also for 
creating and sustaining the '^ tone " of 
the place. Scolding or threats or what 
boys cair^' jaw," or much talking of any 
kind, makes boys unresponsive and hard. 
There is nothing to which a head-master 
will give greater attention than the spoken 
word. It is impossible to estimate the 
force of truth put in a kindly way, whether 
in private or public. We are all ready to 
testify, as has been testified above, that, 
though the ears of our youth would feign 
have been dull to what seemed hard, cer- 
tain plain words given to us with looks of 
love and personal interest have echoed all 
through our lives. And in the crowd evil 
will always hide or show its true self when 
good is outspoken. A school without the 
' ' man ' ' to speak may be a ' ' field ' ' for 
rowdyism or play, or even worse, but not a 
** home " with store of honored tradition. 



SCHOOL 75 

When we speak of tradition, we are 
crossing the bridge from the ' ' man ' ' to the 
* * wall. ' ' Tradition, tixed as firm as a wall, 
is as necessary for the true life of a school 
as the wall of the house in which the boys 
live. And, moreover, the one is as useless 
as the other if there is no life within; per- 
haps worse, as hypocrisy and fraud are 
only too ready to hire the empty tradition. 
Blow it up first, for it is sure to crumble 
and decay with such tenants, and the 
crumbling process is dangerous. If, how- 
ever, there is a spark of the old life of 
truth within, open the windows, let in light 
and air, and the old friend will revive, and 
we may save his old home by timely repair ; 
let fresh bricks be laid into the same old 
wall to make it fair again. Growing life 
must be built in with every brick and stone, 
and laid true with the well-mixed mortar 
of experience, that both lovers of the old 
and disciples of the new may freely and 
willingly give their lives to the building. 

Such is the ' ' living wall ' ' that protects 
the *' Field-Home." In other words, with 
every effort at perfection of material wall 
and system, the '' personality " of the 
school should never be lost. Personality, 



76 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

with its growing and expanding life, is as 
necessary in an institution of education as 
in the individual man, and there is the 
same danger in the one as in the other, of 
the weakening of growth by a too great 
dependence on system and on all other out- 
ward appliances which become embodied in 
the walls of brick and stone. The '' wall," 
whether of tradition, of system, of natural 
surroundings, or of buildings, may be the 
* ' Almighty wall ' ' indeed, both for protec- 
tion and for direction, but, like any habit 
for the man, it must be the slave and not 
the master of the life, if it is to be instru- 
mental in creating power. Moreover, un- 
less it is a growing wall, it is sure to be- 
come a barrier and to turn school to prison. 

Some words written by George Tyrrell, 
in regard to the use of system in the life 
of man, apply so directly to the same sub- 
ject in school as to make them worth the 
quoting to a teacher, — we are all so 
tempted to put too much upon system. 

He jvrites : ' ' Personality, in the moral 
sense of the term, means spiritual freedom 
and self-mastery; and admits of endless 
measures of depth and extension. So far 
as we are passively borne along by our feel- 



SCHOOL 77 

ings, our habits and inclinations ; so far as 
we are but wheels in the great mecha- 
nism of nature and are governed by physi- 
cal, physiological, and psychological laws 
without attempting to use and control them ; 
just so far are we things and not persons. 
We are persons in the measure that we 
oppose ourselves to all this mechanism, 
and through the understanding of it, are 
able to subject and use it to spiritual ends. 

'' ' God made man only a little lower 
than the angels,' in so far as He ' put all 
things under his feet '; and man approxi- 
mates indefinitely to the Divine ideal of 
personality in the measure that he raises 
himself higher and higher above nature by 
knowledge and self-control. 

* * But it is first wi,thin himself that man 
comes in conflict with this mechanism ; with 
uniformities of instinct and habit; with 
psychological and physiological laws that 
tend to wrest the government out of the 
hands of the spirit and to destroy person- 
ality. For in virtue of his bodily organ- 
ism, man is a part of nature and continu- 
ous with nature, — a wheel in the universal 
machine. He must, then, master nature 
within himself, as well as outside himself 



78 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

— a mastery that demands difficult self- 
knowledge, laborious self-discipline. When 
we remember that virtues and vices are 
both classified as ' habits,' it is plain that 
a habit as such is neither good nor evil. 
A good habit is a psychological mechanism 
that frees our personality for fuller and 
wider action, that extends our control 
over nature within or outside ourselves; 
whereas an evil habit impedes our free- 
dom and narrows the possibilities of life. 
Conditioned as we are, the same mecha- 
nism of nature or habit which can impede 
us and destroy our personality is also the 
necessary means of our spiritual develop- 
ment. If our struggle is against the domi- 
nation of dead uniformity, law, habit, 
mechanism, it is only because such laws 
or habits, once perhaps useful, have be- 
come mischievous through changing exi- 
gencies and the demands of a higher life; 
because the virtues of childhood may be 
vices in manhood; or because these laws 
cross and interfere with one another, and 
need an adjustment of their claims. But 
the whole aim of our struggle is the con- 
stitution of a higher and better system of 
laws: not the destruction, but the recon- 



SCHOOL 79 

struction of the habit-mechanism. The 
very inertia and blind persistence which 
we have to overcome is necessary to the 
perpetuity and stability of the fruits of 
victory. That old self which has to be 
moulded into the new, though blind and 
dead, has in its day been shaped by life 
and intelligence, and bears their traces, as 
a mindless mechanism bears the traces of 
the mind that devised it. So, too, in the 
physical world the principle of death is 
also a condition of life. The determinism 
of Nature, with her system of fixed laws, 
of uniformities of grouping and sequence, 
is itself the work of spirit, — the gathered 
fruit of its past victories, — and yet its 
blind conservatism makes it the foe of 
spirit so far as it not merely retains past 
modifications, but in doing so resists 
further developments, yielding only to vig- 
orous and reiterated onslaughts of the will. 
Hence the complex character of our senti- 
ment toward nature as towards something 
at once blind and intelligent, cruel and 
kind, coarse and tender, forceful and fee- 
ble, sublime and. despicable. 

" As long as life lasts there is need of 
this work of self-reform. Every new attain- 



80 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

ment involves higher and more complex 
tasks; just as every industrial invention 
saves labor in one way only to employ it 
more extensively and profitably in another. 
Moreover, we now understand what the old 
ascetics had ascertained empirically, that 
not to advance is to recede; that there is 
no standing still in the moral and spiritual 
life. For, like machinery, habits quickly 
become out of date and act as a clog on 
progress, unless they are continually ad- 
justed to suit growing exigencies. When 
virtue gets to routine it is on the road to 
vice. So far as our conduct is shaped by 
virtue and habit, it is shaped passively; 
it is not active in the full spiritual sense. 
Yet we must deliberately commit a great 
deal of it to the machinery of habit or 
second nature, if we are to free our best 
energies for higher and fuller action and 
origination. But if we turn the means to 
an end, and think to rest in habituality and 
routine, the spirit falls asleep and ceases 
to be conscious and self -determining. " 

While every thinking man must acknowl- 
edge the wisdom of these remarks, they 
seem doubly interesting and freighted with 
wisdom for the teacher, who will apply 



SCHOOL 81 

them equally to his own life and that of 
his school. 

May the writer again be pardoned if 
he recalls the early days in which he at 
times marvelled at the apparent disregard 
of the ' ' wall ' ' expressed in the life of the 
head-master of our old school. While none 
could be more firm about tradition, cus- 
tom, and the fixity of habit, there was ever 
going on the making of tradition, the up- 
building of custom and of habit, with a 
mistrust of all unalterable method in ma- 
terial wall or printed rule, with such a 
ready adaptability to timely devices and 
quick appreciation of improvement and 
growth that this man in his great humanity 
seemed the very antithesis of system in 
'' wall " or " man." Brimming with life 
himself, all that he touched sprung to use- 
fulness in its simplest and most direct 
form. So far as there was any system, it 
was to emphasize the personality of boy 
and man, to make his school a living thing, 
to ''pass on life from the living to the liv- 
ing." While we have seen this system 
work, we have seen the other thing fail: 
good and able men in their degree apply- 
ing machinery, forcing habits good in 



82 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

themselves till they have come to be the 
very coffins for both the men and their 
boys. 

Therefore, as a school grows in size, it 
is necessary to develop a system that al- 
ways tends to accentuate the responsibility 
of every master for every boy. The unity of 
the ' ' home ' ' and the care of the ' ' home ' ' 
for each and every individual, are charac- 
teristics never to be lost. When a school 
becomes, so large that the head-master can- 
not know, and, in a way, personally direct 
the life of every boy, it begins to be a mis- 
take. Edward Thring, in England, and 
Henry Coit, in America, both built up their 
own schools, and both concluded that three 
hundred boys were about the limit for such 
a school; but it is interesting to note that 
both allowed the number to grow to three 
hundred and thirty. Under a great head, 
the unity of such a number, maintained by 
personal force and by a '' wall " which as 
often as possible gathers the whole school 
into one body, is of great power over the 
individual. There is a secret force per- 
vading such a body that is ever at work. 
The timely word spoken to move the whole 
body gathers force as the ideal or thought 



SCHOOL 83 

conveyed, like an electric current, flashes 
through every heart; the influence on the 
individual of such a body at reverent wor- 
ship is hardly to be measured; the enthu- 
siasm that catches the whole school on the 
playground is directly in ratio to the num- 
ber. And besides all this, the individual 
boy has a wider ' ' field ' ' for his talents, as 
well as a larger body from which to find his 
friends and helpers among masters and 
boys. No matter how odd the boy, I have 
never yet seen one who did not find his 
own in such a school. There is no danger 
of one or two boys or any clique of boys 
getting the upper hand : every boy has, in 
other words, a better chance for his own 
individuality in a large school than in a 
small school. At the same time, the stand- 
ard of excellence may always be higher, as 
there are more from among whom to draw 
the fine scholars, the fine athletes, the fine 
musicians, and, above all, the fine-hearted, 
to be leaders. As to the greater number 
of weak boys and those of evil influence, 
this is entirely in the hands of the head- 
master. However, let us remark in pass- 
ing that the nearer the life can be kept 
natural, with a chance to meet and over- 



84 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

come the natural temi3tations, the better 
the school. A place weeded of so-called 
bad boys, or even poor and backward schol- 
ars, is no true home or natural field. The 
tares and the wheat must grow together 
here, as in the larger field, if the school 
is to be a place of true education. 

In a discussion among a body of school- 
masters, the conclusion was being drawn 
that Church schools should not attempt 
to educate the ' ' duffer, ' ' when one quietly 
asked the question, " What, then, is to be- 
come of the duffer? " This question put 
the conclusion in its true light, a conclu- 
sion which is a disgrace to any Christian 
school. Such a conclusion is perfectly ad- 
missible in any special training for partic- 
ular professions, but entirely contrary to 
the whole spirit that ought to pervade 
our school of general education for the 
young. 

Now as to the plan of our ' ' wall ' ' in the 
general organization of a school that, from 
its size as well as from its unity, is going 
to bring the greatest good to the individ- 
ual: it has been well said that the head- 
master must begin at the top, that he must 
produce in his masters and older boys a 



SCHOOL 86 

feeling of trust and loyalty, whick should 
filter down to the bottom. While there 
can never be too much care in regard to 
every detail of school management, great 
men may easily be swamped by petty 
cares. Keeping school, like any other 
business, while it depends at one end on the 
perfection of detail, depends, at the other, 
on the opportunity of wise men to use 
their wisdom. The secret is for the man 
at the top to stay at the top, to have his 
work so organized as to make his person- 
ality felt through others all the way to the 
bottom. It is always the first and last 
business of the head-master to know thor- 
oughly his masters and his boys. Other 
knowledge can be bought, but this must be 
his own at first hand. Gradations of knowl- 
edge and gradations of trust naturally sug- 
gest circles within circles, till the ' ' head ' ' 
stands firmly entrenched in the hearts of 
the select from both boys and men. No 
business enterprise, least of all a school, 
can be successfully conducted and passed 
on unimpaired to future generations with- 
out this mutual confidence between the 
" head " and his lieutenants. And yet, so 
all-important is the factor of personality 



86 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

in the work of education, and so engross- 
ing the call to and for the individual, that 
this corporate strength has not been gen- 
erally attained in our schools. Greater 
appreciation of the power of unity, com- 
bined with a corresponding stricter self- 
discipline, is necessary to enable the strong 
man to throw his strength unselfishly into 
the personality of the whole family. Be 
this as it may, the call becomes louder each 
year for better men to work a better 
system. 

The natural selection from among the 
masters for greater trust and responsibil- 
ity would be the heads of houses. Here 
there arises, then, the question of many 
small houses or a few large houses. It has 
been my observation that a man, or a man 
with his wife, capable of properly caring 
for a house of twenty-five boys in a large 
school under a head-master, is capable of 
caring for a house of one hundred boys; 
and it is easier to find three such men than 
a dozen. Moreover, all that may be said 
for a large school may also be said for a 
large house. There will always be excep- 
tional cases of boys for whom special ar- 
rangements should be made in the private 



SCHOOL 87 

houses of different masters. But, both for 
sentiment and for practical purposes, there 
is a mysterious virtue in the '' three-in- 
one." The three heads of houses form an 
excellent and practical inner council, and 
each will have ample scope for the use of 
all his powers. And while the three houses, 
for all purposes of individual care and 
house arrangement, are independent, there 
is always the larger life of the whole as 
developed in the passing of boys from 
house to house while they advance in the 
school ; as developed in the chapel services, 
on the playground, and in whatever way 
the personality of the head-master draws 
his boys together in unity of feeling or 
action. Under the " three-in-one," while 
there is equal opportunity for attention to 
the individual, there is less opportunity 
for the growth of a small individual spirit 
to possess a house or the whole school. 

The system of many houses, where the 
custom prevails of placing a boy in the 
same house for his whole course, necessi- 
tates a household composed of young and 
old. While this is the natural family rela- 
tion, yet it is not natural to have a family 
of twenty-five boys and no girls ; and these 



88 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

boys are not of the same blood and never 
can live in the natural relation of blood 
brotherhood. The most evident, if not the 
most practical, way to work such a house 
in order to keep it even comparatively 
pure, is to establish the relation between 
young and old which obtains in the English 
schools — fags and their masters. This is 
manifestly out of the question in America. 
The unmanly relations between young and 
older, so likely to grow in large households 
of boys of no kin to one another, seem to 
me a very grave evil. On the contrary, 
a house of one hundred boys of nearly the 
same age develops an esprit du corps that 
is not congenial to petting or to bullying. 
Such a family has its own life of games 
and fellowship that is a great advantage 
especially to the little new boy, to whom it 
gives a stimulus and happiness that are al- 
most entirely lacking in the other system. 
In such a building, also, the boy of four- 
teen or fifteen learns to shoulder a re- 
sponsibility and leadership among his fel- 
lows as monitor or captain. In the 
lower and middle schools those quali- 
ties of a boy are pretty well tried out, so 
that when he comes to the top form in the 



SCHOOL 89 

upper school there is small chance to 
make a mistake in the selection of school 
leaders. 

A well-organized system of monitors or 
prefects is of vital importance in school, if 
boys are to be properly trained to citizen- 
ship. Yet such a system uncontrolled by 
the strong personality of the head-master, 
such a system when there is not mutual 
confidence between man and boy, is capable 
of hatching and protecting some of the 
worst evils of school-life. Boys easily lose 
heart and fail miserably in maintaining 
high standards without constant leadership 
and inspiration from their elders. Evil 
organizes without help ; but seldom, if ever, 
do boys get together for good of their 
own accord. Eternal vigilance on the part 
of the teacher is the price of order and 
tone, under any system where humanity is 
the subject. 

As there are great art and tact to be used 
in handling leaders, so there is room for 
the best judgment in the manner of selec- 
tion. The choices that boys make for 
their various captains, leavened with a 
scholar here and there from a position of 
influence, seems the natural line. The rule 



90 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

of sucli boys should rest, first, upon tlieir 
own personal cliaracters ; second, upon the 
authority of the whole body of monitors; 
and, finally, upon the reference by tha,t 
body of doubtful or bad cases to the head- 
master. The ordinary channels of punish- 
ment used by the masters should be 
avoided by the monitors. A word from a 
monitor to a lower boy is generally very 
effective. For a wrongdoer to be haled 
before the whole body of monitors is more 
effective. Deprivation of certain privi- 
leges in games or other departments of 
school-life under their supervision, would 
be the means of punishment used by them 
before sending up a boy to the head-master. 
All house monitors should be directly re- 
sponsible to the captain of the school or 
otherwise designated head of the monitors. 
Such leaders among boys, catching the tone 
of loving watchfulness from the head- 
master, can be fairly trusted to deal suc- 
cessfully with all that class of underhand 
mischief or secret badness that is ready 
to break loose in any school. 

This digression on the monitorial system 
crept into our sketch of the house rule sim- 
ply to note that a house of young boys can 



SCHOOL 91 

well supply its own leaders. It is an excep- 
tional nursery where the oldest child can- 
not be both utilized and helped by giving 
it a position of responsibility over the 
others. It is the nature and right of the 
older in any stage to protect and guard the 
younger. 

Before leaving the subject of the division 
of boys into houses according to their ages, 
let us note the great advantage that comes 
to a boy by a change from " lower " to 
** middle," and again to '' upper." 

The ambition to go up higher is whet- 
ted and adds zest to the life, while the boy 
himself has another chance to improve 
or to begin over with new men and new sur^ 
roundings. Old friends, if he has them, 
are not far away and still frequently meet 
the boy in class or on the playground or 
in their studies, while it may be just the 
new friend, the one who '' understands," 
that is needful to put a boy on his feet. 
There is a charm in this sort of house-to- 
house life, peculiar to itself. A strong 
community of life between three separate 
large houses makes also for growth in a 
remarkably happy and practical fashion. 
It is another of the many exemplifications 



92 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

of the power of life embodied in the 
'^ three-in-one." The moral advantages of 
such a system are akin to the practical and 
physical ones which come from the con- 
stant necessity for being in the open air, 
going from dormitory to school and din- 
ing-room and library and chapel. Move- 
ment is the life of the yonng, and boys if 
not kept going healthfully will go un- 
healthfully. 

Breadth and distinctness, the whole 
body and the individual, are peculiarly 
served by three families in the one great 
school. 

While a man at the head of such a place 
has ample scope for great powers, the 
school is not so directly dependent on the 
one man as to grow sick and die if for a 
time he fails. Each house has its head and 
its independent life, and may maintain not 
only its own standard, but brace each one 
of the others to keep up to high ideals of 
life. 

This faculty to perpetuate itself is a 
very important one for a school. It is 
difficult to find men with the requisite train- 
ing for a head-mastership. The house 
training should provide this very thing. In 



SCHOOL 93 

our ideal school, three men would thus be 
always " on deck " and available for just 
such calls. And there should be also, in 
every large school, provision for the train- 
ing of under teachers. If a school is what 
it ought to be, there will be a desire on the 
part of graduates here and there to return 
and teach. For these men, as well as for 
all inexperienced teachers coming to a 
place, the work taken up should be with a 
view to break them in without discourage- 
ment to themselves or loss to the boys. 
Such men should be assigned as assistants 
to the older teachers, to attend their 
classes, correct the written work in class 
and out, take the backward boys for more 
individual work, and do many things that 
would greatly facilitate the labor of the 
man skilled in conducting a class, so that 
he might do more of the work for which 
he is especially fitted. A new hand would 
thus have not only a chance to review his 
subject and to learn the names, faces, and 
ways of boys without friction, but would 
have the opportunity also of observing the 
methods of a skilled man, and, from time 
to time, of teaching the class in the pres- 
ence of his superior. Why such a system 



94 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

is not universal in our larger schools, I do 
not see, unless it be that we do not seri- 
ously believe in our profession. The doc- 
tor and the lawyer, even after years of 
special training, humble themselves to just 
such personal observation and supervi- 
sion; why not the teacher! 

I earnestly look forward to the day when 
teaching will be held in such honor that 
the best men will be pressing into the 
ranks, ready to endure hardships, and 
ashamed to present themselves as responsi- 
ble teachers till they have won the right 
to shape and mould the life of man. 

When schools are manned by the strong 
of the community, there will be no fear of 
the future of our country. Under such in- 
fluences traditions never extend an iron 
grip ; yet they never grow old nor die, but 
live on, ever filled with the richest blood of 
living and life-giving men. 



SOME QUESTIOT^S OP EXPENSE 

THE question of many houses or one 
house in a school, introduces the 
problem of cost. 

Good education will always be expensive ; 
therefore, considered merely as a business 
venture, no detail is too small to be care- 
fully scrutinized. But there is a more im- 
portant reason for such care: namely, the 
necessity laid upon us, especially at this 
time, of teaching the young habits of econ- 
omy. The child who has always re- 
ceived with a bountiful hand must learn 
to give. To give, he must have and har- 
bor resources. The value of money, as well 
as of time, is, therefore, an all-important 
lesson, and one that is learned more ef- 
fectually by example than by precept. All 
that we can hope to do here is to touch 
upon a few general lines, and by the way to 
95 



96 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

IDoint out some practical methods, both for 
keeping down the cost of education and for 
teaching economy to the child. 

Three or four hundred can be fed more 
economically in one large dining-hall than 
in several smaller ones. Yet what is 
gained in cost does not seem sufficient to 
wipe out the homelessness of such a plan. 
Separate dining-rooms are a main feature 
in the sentiment of separate houses. One 
hundred young and happy people are about 
all that can be satisfactorily handled in one 
dining-room, if the manners of the younger 
and the nerves of the elder are to have 
their due consideration. Three houses 
under one management seem to combine 
efficiency with the best economy for a large 
school in America. 

Too much care cannot be given to the 
quality of the food, its cooking, and its 
service. It is a truth often neglected by 
spiritually-minded men that the needs of 
the body must come first. Money spent in 
wholesome, well-cooked, and well-served 
food; money spent in proper ventilation 
of buildings; money spent in providing 
opportunity for ample and life-giving play 
and exercise will come back in compound 



SOME QUESTIONS OF EXPENSE 97 

interest to the school. These things are 
all matters of plain business and common- 
sense, and should be in the hands of plain 
business and common-sense men. The day 
is coming when a school will be ashamed 
to send in huge bills to parents for medi- 
cal attendance and infirmary charges that 
arise from poor feeding, poor ventila- 
tion, and want of a regulated and happy 
play. 

But the crux in the cost of education is 
and always will be the man. Improved 
sanitary living embodies itself in material 
appliances, but human nature is always 
and will be always the same backsliding 
factor," ever ready to take things easy 
and to get the most for the least. In edu- 
cation, perhaps more than in any other 
industry, men must not only be paid in 
coin of the Eepublic, but they must be paid 
in the coin of ''life," lest their manhood 
fail. The vocation of the teacher is hard 
and life-destroying unless he himself be 
looked after and loved. For some the old 
Italian proverb is only too true, " The 
teacher is like a candle that burns itself 
while it lights others." And though the 
oil that we need for our lamps is not 



98 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

money, yet it flows but slowly through the 
empty pocket. We have sometimes " to 
go and buy for ourselves. ' ' 

Let us consider this a little in detail. 
The new head-master of a new foundation, 
in looking over an old school to get 
points, made the remark that he had 
money enough at his disposal to provide 
not only all the material advantages in the 
market, but also the best men. Plis idea 
was to man his school with high-priced 
specialists. The result was not all that he 
expected, though it was what the old head- 
master of the old school predicted. He said 
that he supposed his friend would have to 
learn by experience that a specialist was 
about the last man to teach boys ; that al- 
most any ordinarily gifted and trained 
man soon acquires enough of his subject 
to teach it well if he is a teacher; that an 
all-round man whose specialty is the boy 
is the kind of man; that, as a class, these 
men do not demand or want high salaries. 
Such men generally lead a simple life from 
choice, and by experience they learn that 
their power of leadership is weakened by 
self-indulgence and display. The true 
teacher never works for *' pay " and can- 



SOME QUESTIONS OF EXPENSE 99 

not be bought. Higli standards and ample 
fields for work are what hold such men 
and keep them in a school. That is the 
*' life " upon which they feed, and, unless 
that is provided, they will go elsewhere or 
gradually sink to the dead level of the 
drudge. 

At the same time, a teacher should not 
be pinched, and his salary should be suf- 
ficient to keep him and his family, if he has 
one, free from the petty annoyances of 
poverty, with a chance for those relaxa- 
tions which are absolutely essential to one 
of our profession. It is as hopeless to keep 
a good man on a poor man's salary as it is 
to expect manly self-restraint and unself- 
ishness among the boys when they see their 
masters living even on the borders of lux- 
ury. As to the expense necessary to main= 
tain a certain number of married men in a 
school, I was delighted to notice that Presi- 
dent Harper shortly before his death de- 
clared that, in his opinion, married pro- 
fessors were better than single, that the 
added expense to an institution of educa- 
tion was more than repaid by the added 
usefulness of the man. If in a university, 
doubly so in a school where the humanizing 



100 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

effect of family life, of women and chil- 
dren, is of untold benefit. Men who have 
lived in a school through its early years 
of bachelorhood will note the change in 
tone that gradually creeps in with the 
arrival of another bride and with the 
appearance of little ones playing about the 
grounds. 

By all means the most powerful factor 
in producing habits of economy among 
children is the example set by their elders 
in school and at home. But in addition to 
example it requires tact and perseverance 
to train boys into a care for little things, 
such a care as forbids waste at the table 
and forbids that disregard of their own 
and others' property so universal in a 
crowd of boys. Everything has come to 
the child without effort, and there is a 
corresponding resentment against any 
restraint on his freedom to do what he 
will with his own. If, moreover, he is al- 
lowed to do what he will with his own, he 
does what he wills with what is not his own, 
for he naturally concludes that the other 
fellow '' doesn't care." The school is his 
school and mother — the boys are his 
friends and brothers ; '' they don't care " is 



SOME QUESTIONS OF EXPENSE 101 

a sentiment not wholly untrue, and in its 
proper bearing should be made the founda- 
tion for teaching each boy to care not only 
for his fellows, but for everything that per- 
tains to the health and happiness of the 
whole household. Boys are easily brought 
to acknowledge the inconvenience to others 
as well as the wrong of helping themselves 
to others' pencils, paper, books, grub, 
clothes, or playthings; and, by a proper 
organization among themselves, can be 
taught to put down all that kind of brig- 
andage which school-masters are often too 
prone to overlook. 

The monitors, and others organized to 
regulate more particularly the undercur- 
rent of the social life in a school, are the 
ones to rouse to their duty in this regard. 
They are materially helped by having con- 
trol of a certain amount of public money 
to go toward this side of the boys' life. 
To give them this ally, as well as to provide 
a natural outlet for the cash that burns in 
a boy's pocket, and, furthermore, to help 
in putting straight the whole question of 
the loss and waste of property, the older 
boys should be allowed to have under their 
supervision the cooperative store. While 



102 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

the bills for breakages in tlie scliool are 
regularly paid from the treasury of this 
store, there soon grows the habit of plac- 
ing the responsibility and the cost upon the 
right one. A boy soon learns then to pay 
for his own carelessness. For the same 
reason, and with a like result, those whose 
property has been lost or destroyed by 
unauthorized borrowers, should be reim- 
bursed out of the common stock, after the 
case has been passed upon by a committee 
of the older boys. Such a system is easily 
worked under the auditing of some careful 
man, and on trial has given very satis- 
factory results. Where there was such a 
plan in operation the janitor was in- 
structed to gather up any articles left 
lying about, and these were put in the store 
for redemption at a nominal price, and 
periodically there was some fun auction- 
ing off the unclaimed property to the high- 
est bidder. Even then, at the end of term, 
there were always a number of valuable 
articles suitable for giving away to the 
needy. Old Bishop Morris, of Oregon, 
once commenting upon the appearance of 
such a junk-shop, said, '* Boys, you are all 
right: you have good authority for gath- 



SOME QUESTIONS OF EXPENSE 103 

ering up the ' fragments that remain that 
nothing be lost.' " 

This whole question of education in 
habits of care as to meum and tuum is, 
however, such a distasteful one that in 
many schools it is practically discarded. 
Hence the failure in honesty of so many 
educated men. 

In a good school there should be no leaks 
except the unavoidable, just enough as we 
say of a boat, ' ' to keep her sweet. ' ' Every 
salaried man and woman in the place, from 
the house-master to the cook, is either a leak 
or a loyal friend, according as he or she is 
made to feel that he is part of a great work 
going on for the betterment of men. Good 
cooks and good farmers cannot be bought 
with simple coin of the realm any more 
than good teachers. The kitchen and the 
farm must have also the coin of life, the 
love and the care of a person. 

" Business is business." 

But there is more sentiment in business 
than many of our hard-headed friends will 
admit. Witness the success of the man 
who is in the business of politics. He 
knows the money in the kind word or deed. 



VI 

THE PLAYGROUND 

^' ALL work and no play makes Jack 
XJl a dull boy." While this is equally 
true of Gill, her play comes in lighter 
ways, and the strenuous life of the play- 
ground is not such an absolute necessity 
for her as it is for the average boy. The 
lack of experience with girls on the play- 
ground, except to have been occasionally 
beaten in tennis by some young Amazon, 
constrains us to drop this side of the sub- 
ject, and to confine ourselves to the boy's 
play. The development of manly qualities 
in the woman does not seem to have pro- 
duced a corresponding beauty of home life. 
What does the boy say! Ask him if he 
likes to have his mother roll up her sleeves 
and go in for athletics. We say, " Ask 
the boy," because he is in those respects 
the natural animal as God made him, un- 
spoiled by theories of education or prac- 
tices of society. 

104 



THE PLAYGROUND 106 

But when it comes to the making of a 
man, if the young one has no pride in his 
own bodily strength, he must be made to 
have it. For him, it is the beginning of 
goodness, the beginning of wisdom. The 
indolent and slack-twisted boy, if it can- 
not be brought about in any other way, 
should be made to exercise. He should be 
taken in hand by some one who knows his 
business and ^^ set up " every day, till he 
can stand and walk and run and jump 
alone, and till he wants to play. 

Enforced play is a contradiction in 
terms. Therefore, the whole atmosphere 
of the playground should be, as far as pos- 
sible, one of freedom, the boys being left, 
on certain well-defined lines, to manage 
their own games. Play is the thing to be 
first recognized. If there is not a place 
for play in every child's life, the results 
will be disastrous; and if the play is not 
natural and healthy play, the best results 
will not be attained. If the playground 
is turned into a field simply for exercise, 
so exacting that it ceases to be play but be- 
comes work, the spontaneous growth of the 
young child or college boy is spoiled. He 
is '' coached " and " managed " and even 



106 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

' ' tricked ' ' out of his rightful heritage. On 
the other hand, if the playground is en- 
tirely neglected by the elders and left to 
the rowdyism that is sure thus to develop, 
the school is failing to utilize one of its 
strongest allies in the cause of education. 
Do not let us say allies, but rather fac- 
tors; for, whether it be a school in city 
or country, a private or a public school, 
the playground should be a part of the 
school. It certainly is an encouraging sign 
of the times that from many of our district 
schools and high schools come invitations 
to witness play in the field as well as play 
in the house. Sports and concerts and lit- 
erary entertainments are all becoming rec- 
ognized factors of the life of every school. 
In a free land like ours, these recreations 
tend to balance one another, so that there 
seems little cause for alarm that the body 
will receive too great a worship. 

However, there does seem cause for 
alarm in the undue rivalry that is being 
cultivated among our young people. It 
is the same old story as in the home : every- 
thing is done to spoil the baby, and then 
comes the price to pay to the wilful, high- 
tempered, spoiled boy. So often in our 



THE PLAYGROUND 107 

schools so much is done to arouse rivalry 
and the desire to win that it becomes 
part of the nature of the American boy 
to win even by doubtful means^ What 
can we expect in finance and social rivalry 
of those who have imbibed for so many 
years the spirit that now commonly per- 
vades the playgrounds of our schools and 
colleges? The thoughtful man must think 
of many things as he sits, one among thirty 
thousand, in Harvard's Stadium to watch 
an athletic contest between Harvard and 
Yale. Among all his questions and con- 
clusions, one question will not be stilled, 
'' What effect has all this adulation upon 
the character of these young gladiators? '* 
and one conclusion is quite settled : namely, 
that this is not a playground. 

The good old games that grew into shape 
under the demands of natural, healthy 
play, have had violent hands laid on them 
by committees of men who have got 
through the days of play and whose 
minds are set on business. The problem 
is to turn the game into a spectacular per- 
formance which brings in much receipts 
for gate money and many dollars to the 
purveyors of defensive armor. A boy must 



108 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

now ask his mother if he may play ; he must 
think twice himself, and must dress him- 
self many times before he plays; and his 
father and his schoolmaster? Why, they 
are out of it altogether; 

Now all this nonsense on the playground 
has arisen from the fact that the school 
has not done its duty ; it has not duly con- 
sidered its responsibility for the play of 
the child, and has allowed those interested 
in business and glory to order the play- 
ground. Graduates ought to leave the 
games alone, and no managers or other 
professionals ought to be tolerated. Of 
course such a view is impractical as 
long as the present system of intercol- 
legiate and interscholastic sport is in 
vogue. 

A wise school will be the absolute arbiter 
of the games to be played, and will see to 
it that its boys play, and not solely or 
principally train a team to down some 
other team. Men at college will play 
what they have learned at school. Now 
the sequence is reversed. Boys at school 
try to play what graduates arrange for 
college men to perform. Owing to many 
causes, however, the result is not wholly 



THE PLAYGROUND 109 

bad; as objects of betting, athletic contests 
certainly are an improvement on cards and 
dice; as objects of interest to the great 
body of men they are an undoubted im- 
provement on college rows and silly 
pranks; but as factors in education, they 
are not what they might be. 

As an American boy who entered enthu- 
siastically into all games, and as a school- 
master who is still playing with boys, my 
experience is that a spirit of undue rivalry, 
whether used to create loyalty for school 
or simply to cultivate in the individual the 
desire to win, is far too prevalent. It 
has not only subverted the whole idea of 
play, but it has tended to breed in our 
stock an inordinate and impatient desire 
for immediate success. The expression 
** to win " has lost its proper significance, 
and has degenerated into the vulgar con- 
ception of ' ' getting the best of ' ' your fel- 
low. The boy is in the way of being 
trained into an utterly false standard of 
life. His eye is fixed on all the little trump- 
ery prizes by the way; he is ever racing 
with somebody; he is worn out with the 
competition, and loses sight of the great 
prize: to find that place among his fel- 



110 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

lows which is Ms, and which he can fill 
better than any other man. And every 
man knows, if he knows anything, that this 
is found only by that opposite spirit of 
self-surrender which grows in the long 
days and nights of work and play without 
any cups, even of pewter. But what joy 
in the winning of that prize! as we learn 
to lose sight of ourselves and our little 
gains and losses, as we find ourselves fit- 
ting into, and working with, a higher power 
expressed in all nature and in our fellow 
men. This happiness is a natural happi- 
ness that starts in the nursery for the child 
brought up in faith; but it is marred be- 
yond recognition in the rivalries of the 
school. By a system of rivalry in the class- 
room and on the playground we deliber- 
ately educate our children into ways of 
individualism that require a lifetime of 
pain and failure to eradicate. We shall 
have more to say on this head when we 
treat of the classroom and religion in 
school. Too much stress, however, cannot 
be laid upon the influence of play on char- 
acter. It is when we have lost ourselves, 
when effort becomes spontaneous, that life 
leaps within us. 



THE PLAYGROUND 111 

It seems very plain to us, therefore, that 
the first step in purifying our children's 
play is to put in its proper place this spirit 
of rivalry, to bridle it and guide it on the 
road to good fellowship and play for play's 
sake. The root of the trouble seems to be 
in the custom of intercollegiate and inter- 
scholastic athletics. For a school to de- 
pend on rivalry with other schools in order 
to develop esprit de corps is a sad con- 
fession of weakness. It is true, such 
rivalry does arouse a kind of loyalty which 
is a very convenient handle for the master 
to use for higher purposes. But it is a 
tonic that is taken at the expense of true 
vitality. Such a loyalty is largely super- 
ficial and more of the shouting quality than 
that which depends on the true worth of 
the school and runs more quietly and more 
deeply. 

A natural and happy rivalry is always 
manifest, and is no doubt a principal fac- 
tor on the playground. But the ground 
should depend on its own attractions to 
draw out the children, not on any un- 
healthy or spectacular excitement ; and the 
school should appreciate the necessity of 
enhancing this attractiveness in every le- 



112 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

gitimate way. We shall see growing up 
in our land a better and finer race of men 
and women, when every school has an 
ample and attractive playground. All 
children will play at something, and it 
needs only the space and appliances and a 
little steering on the part of the elders 
to turn the play into its best channels. The 
man that goes on to the playground with 
his boys will not only have many chances 
to do and say the right thing, but he will 
find the snarls of his own work dropping 
out by themselves. Let him play sim- 
ply as a fellow with no authority, and he 
will experience the sweetness of that fel- 
lowship where years are forgotten and 
time is no more. 

While every chance ought to be given for 
the individual to choose congenial recrea- 
tion, such as wandering in the fields and 
woods or playing games of less violence, 
the games themselves should be so organ- 
ized as to discountenance spectators, and 
to gather in all possible players, whether 
young or old. The prominent games 
should be those that call for team work and 
give exercise to the moral qualities of obe- 
dience, unselfishness, good temper, and 



THE PLAYGROUND 113 

patient effort, as well as the popular ones 
of pluck and dash. 

The playgrounds of England have long 
stood as the training grounds of her great 
men ; men not only of profound ability, but 
men who have ever stood ready to sacrifice 
themselves, even in the remote corners of 
the earth, for the good of their fellows, — 
such sacrifice learned, as they said, on the 
playing fields of Eton. Let any one to-day 
spend a quiet week at one of their great 
schools, or at either of the universities, or 
indeed among the thousands of artisans 
playing on the commons or in the parks, 
and he will at once recognize a spirit quite 
different from our own ; and the difference 
not indeed to our advantage. There is still 
to be found the " friendly game " which, 
some of us remember, was the form of 
words used in the old-fashioned challenge. 
Interscholastic sport is the exception and 
in no case the raison d'etre. Play for 
play's sake is the rule. And does this 
make a man easy to beat? It has not been 
our experience. It is all give and take 
in his own ' ' tight little Island, ' ' but let an 
outsider dare to win from Johnny and he 
will not have a comfortable time. There 



114 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

his patriotism is stirred, and his long pres- 
tige in sport has made the Englishman a 
poor loser. But they certainly can teach 
•us how to play among themselves. 

Cricket stands alone as a team game 
which refuses to be Americanized; and 
alone as a team game open to young and 
old with no favor. It is very much to our 
loss that it is not our principal school 
game, as it is in England. Ask almost any 
man who has had a thorough course of 
cricket, and he will tell you that, for the 
manly qualities that stand through life, he 
owes more to cricket than to any one game 
or to any one study. While its merits be- 
come thoroughly appreciated only by the 
trained cricketer, any observer of the game 
at a school may readily understand its ad- 
vantages. In the first place, it is not spec- 
tacular, and so boys are not tempted to sit 
around and become mere rooters; it is, 
therefore, not calculated to rouse mere 
noise and antagonisms in the school. On 
the contrary, the game has rather a quiet- 
ing influence on turbulent spirits, and 
always a steadying effect on the indi- 
vidual. "\Vhat is more, he does not soon 
grow tired of it, but, as the season ad- 



THE PLAYGROUND 115 

vances, grows more and more interested: 
there is so much for the individual to learn 
in the mere batting and bowling that the 
appetite is continually being whetted. 
While any number, from two up, can play 
endless single wicket matches where the 
skill of the individual is the principal fac- 
tor, the regular game offers a wide field for 
generalship and team play. And not the 
least that can be said in its favor as a 
school game is the great number of boys 
that can get general practice, or play single 
wicket matches on one field. I have fre- 
quently counted one hundred and fifty boys 
all playing on a field of four or five acres. 
And there is no game in which the simple 
hour of practice is so engrossing. 

This game embodies the best instincts of 
our race, and comes nearer to the game 
of life than any field sport. Mere rivalry 
has little to do with its interest, and there 
is the same balance of individual prowess, 
team play, and chance that characterizes 
the every-day life of every man. In no 
game is there a like reward for mere pa- 
tient effort. While strength and quickness 
of body have an ample field, still the weak 
and awkward boy may surpass the athlete. 



116 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

because of moral qualities which the other 
lacks. However, it is hardly fair to the 
public to launch a school cricketer into the 
arena of the American playground, where 
the art of ground-making is in its infancy. 
To enjoy cricket there must be good turf, 
and for a youngster to enjoy cricket he 
must be taken in hand early; for some 
years, also, he will need the coaching of a 
trained player. Like everything else that 
claims a high place in its order, it requires 
cultivation for appreciation. 

As a mere exercise, of course, rowing 
cannot be surpassed; but rowing without 
racing is not much sport to the boy, and it 
is very doubtful how far races tend to 
physical development. It is certain, more- 
over, that for most men rowing is out of 
the question; and the boy that has rowed 
assiduously will find in later life his mus- 
cles incapable of excelling in the lighter 
work of the playground in which he may 
wish to indulge between business hours. 

Jn closing this chapter, let me again 
draw attention to my theme: namely, (1) 
that the school playground should depend 
for its attractiveness, not on rivalry, but 
on the beauty and practical character of 



THE PLAYGROUND 117 

the ground, both for summer and winter 
sports ; (2) that the games under the school 
supervision should be such as, in their sea- 
son, to give every kind of a boy a chance 
for healthy, invigorating play that goes to 
cultivate in him the best qualities of fine 
manliness. 



vn 

DISCIPLINE 

DISCIPLINE, we may define, as that 
whicli comes to us in life for pur- 
poses of correction. 

To the child untrained at home, school 
seems to be a place mostly devoted to his 
correction. To avoid discipline comes to 
be one of the chief aims of his existence. 
He is apt to look upon his masters, in a 
mild way, as his natural enemies. Perhaps 
he is a lover of music ; yet his life is made 
wretched by the patient man at his elbow, 
who seeks to correct his false notes, even to 
breaking the time and tune of his perform- 
ance. This must be done, however, if he is 
ever to realize the harmony, though the 
raps on his knuckles may fill his hour with 
nothing but the contemplations of his 
faults. The man, the man at his elbow, 
he alone has it in his power to bring music 
out of it all, to recall the memory of the 

118 



DISCIPLINE 119 

lost harmony, and to rekindle the spark of 
genius by his own inspiring tonch of the 
keys. 

Therefore, in defining the nature of dis- 
cipline, let us go beyond the mere correc- 
tion of a fault, and seek for a higher 
object: namely, correction indeed, but 
correction in order to attain the fuller 
expression of the harmony of life. 
And when it comes to methods, we shall 
never get far from the personality of the 
teacher. 

The harmony of life ! All the notes are 
there in the child as they are in the instru- 
ment; the part that education has to play 
is to bring out the best chords that can 
be made from these beautiful, though 
silent, notes. All the natural powers of 
the child are good; it is their abuse that 
leads to what we call badness. It is not as 
if there was something innately bad that 
had to be killed; it is that the child is to 
be taught, even by pain, the true develop- 
ment of all its powers. This, then, is the 
special work of discipline, the correction 
of faults in such a way as to bring out 
all the true qualities of the child that it 
may sound, each in its true place, those 



120 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

clear notes that produce a life of har- 
mony. 

The school is the larger home and the 
smaller world, and it must combine the 
elements of both. While, on the one hand, 
the personal factor is not so predominant 
as in the home and more is left to what 
may be called the self-discipline of the 
world, on the other hand, the teacher takes 
the place of the parent in the larger home 
of the school. 

Some remarks made by B. W. Maturin 
in '* Self-knowledge and Self-discipline '* 
are well worth quoting in this connection: 
" We cannot imagine that . . . the Cre- 
ator created and placed in man what was 
evil. Analyze the soul of the greatest 
sinner and the greatest saint and you will 
not find in the sinner any single element 
that is not in the saint. Compare the soul 
of the Magdalene or of St. Augustine be- 
fore and after their conversion. There 
was nothing lacking in either after their 
conversion that was there before. As 
saints they were not weakened or emascu- 
lated. Who would have cared to read their 
history if they had not been converted? 
Who, on reading their history, does not 



DISCIPLINE 121 

feel that their lives after their conversion 
were the lives of those who had * come to 
themselves,' that they were then their real 
selves, that somehow they got the power of 
self-expression in the fullest and highest 
sense? They lost nothing, destroyed noth- 
ing, but were in full possession of all their 
powers. There was much in the Magda- 
lene which she had never used, perhaps 
never dreamed of, till she came to our 
Lord ; He revealed to her the secret of true 
self-development, which is another word 
for sanctity ; and she found under his guid- 
ance that everything in her had henceforth 
to be used, and used in a fuller and richer 
way than she had ever imagined before. 
It was in no narrow school of self-limita- 
tion, in no morbid school of false asceti- 
cism, that this poor sinner was educated in 
the principles of sanctity, but in the large 
and merciful school of Him who has been 
ever since the hope of the hopeless, the 
friend of publicans and sinners, who knows 
full well that what men need is not to crush 
and kill their powers, but to find their true 
use and to use them; that holiness is not 
the emptying of life, but the filling; that 
despair has wrapped its dark cloud round 



122 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

many a soul because it found itself in pos- 
session of powers that it abused and could 
not destroy and did not know how to use, 
and who taught them the great and inspir- 
ing doctrine, * I am not come to destroy, 
but to fulfil.' . . . Mortification, therefore, 
is not an end in itself, it is but a means 
to an end, and the end is the truest and 
fullest use of everything that we have. 
* 'Tis life, not death, for which we pant ' 
— the death is a death unto sin as the 
means of entering into a larger life unto 
righteousness. . . . ' For the joy that is 
set before us we endure the cross ' — we do 
not endure it merely for its own sake, but 
for what lies beyond it. And we bear those 
acts of self-denial and self-restraint be- 
cause we feel and know full well that 
through such acts alone can we regain the 
mastery over all our misused powers and 
learn to use them with a vigor and joy such 
as we have never known before." 

Thus writes the priest, and thus sings 
the poet : 

** I held it truth with him who sings 
To one clear harp in divers tones 
That men may rise on stepping stones 
Of their dead selves to higher things. 



DISCIPLINE 123 

" But who shall so forecast the years 
And find in loss a gain to match ? 
Or reach a hand thro ' time to catch 
The far-off interest of tears? 

" Let love clasp both, lest both be drowned." 

Ah! there again is the magic wand that 
alone can " forecast the years and find in 
loss a gain to match. " As we teachers look 
into the hearts of the children committed 
to us, may we see there the image of per- 
fection striving to come to realization, and 
may we love it as part of the inspiration 
of our own lives! Then the iron tool of 
discipline will be held with steady hand, 
and, bit by bit, we shall see the form grow- 
ing from the rough block to the perfection 
of true manhood. This tool must hurt, at 
times severely, but we are assured that we 
are working on the plan of the Creator 
and Saviour and Sanctifier of men. He 
chastens all whom He loves. The attempt 
to bring up children without chastisement 
is not only unchristian and unwise, in the 
light of the flabby results which we see 
about us, but it is cruel to the child; it is 
deferring what is sure to come, in some 
form or another, when the nature is less 
pliable and requires a discipline more se- 



124 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

vere. A few sharp pains to tlie child save 
hours and perhaps years of suifering. The 
longest lives are hardly long enough for 
any of us to learn completely the wisdom 
of submission, which is the art of guiding 
our wills into the channels of true life. 
The child that learns honor and obedience 
to father and mother gets such a start as 
to have almost the monopoly of the best 
that this world can give, the long life : that 
is, the large and full life that comes only 
to him that has learned the lesson of order. 
It is in this sense that the meek inherit the 
earth; in direct ratio to genuine humility 
is a man's power to absorb all the joy and 
beauty of life. 

What a solemn duty, then, awaits the 
man who takes upon himself the dealing 
out of God's discipline to the young in 
order to bring each child to the fulness of 
his life, as we say, to his better self! 
And what a solemn duty to organize in a 
school a system of discipline that tends 
to bring about this result! There are so 
many different selves that the mere men- 
tion of the word system seems out of 
place. There is, in wholesale education, 
a constant danger of levelling all up or 



DISCIPLINE 125 

down to a common standard, and this dan- 
ger is at its height when we are deal- 
ing so directly with the habits and mo- 
tives of the young, as we are in the case 
of discipline. However, we cannot escape 
a certain amount of machinery in the 
school. A teacher requires it to steady him 
and to counteract his own mistakes in judg- 
ment and temper. But, while a teacher has 
a right to expect this help, he has no right 
to throw his own personal responsibility 
upon a machine. Therefore, any school 
system of discipline should tend to the 
cultivation of personal responsibility on 
both sides. It is only in this way that, in 
the first place, true standards of right and 
wrong are constantly kept before the child, 
and that, in the second place, the punish- 
ment results in bringing him to his better 
self. Let us not forget that in bringing a 
child to the full appreciation and use of 
his own powers, the first duty of the school 
is to set and maintain the highest stand- 
ards of life; and, therefore, an all-impor- 
tant part of discipline is the training of the 
conscience to recognition and appreciation 
of these standards. Order and good feel- 
ing bought at the price of poor manners 



126 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

and the lowering of the boy's ideas of right 
and wrong, are too dear. Every feature of a 
system of discipline should tend to correct 
every failure from true righteousness. No 
merely formal standards, or merely formal 
corrections reach the hearts of children: 
both must have expression in their elders 
in order to be effective; here example is 
not only better than precept, but it is 
absolutely indispensable. To set up stand- 
ards of truth, unselfishness, justice, and 
purity without the living and working 
leaders at hand is the surest way to de- 
stroy. By any impersonal or automatic 
system of discipline the conscience of the 
child is trained to admit the legality of 
wrong, so long as the legal penalty is paid ; 
the whole thing becomes a sort of a game; 
and automatic disorder, and worse, become 
the playfellows of automatic discipline ; as 
Edward Thring used to say, " A regula- 
tion punishment soon creates a regulation 
offence." What is worse, in the excite- 
ment of the game, habits of evasion and 
self-excuse are formed to the injury of 
truth and manliness. It will always be one 
of the incomprehensible facts presented to 
a teacher, working in such a system, that 



DISCIPLINE 127 

otherwise fine and manly boys seem to 
lose all sense of truth and good breeding 
when they can clothe themselves with the 
customary garments of the systematic 
schoolboy honor arising from the system- 
atic working of school discipline. No, 
indeed ! Our plan should be anything but 
automatic ; it should be as flexible and hu- 
man as the heart of man. 

Punishment? The severest punishment 
a boy can experience is the thought that he 
has done wrong, and that there is no ex- 
piation for him except in the manly en- 
deavor to do better. The experienced 
teacher has learned how to produce that 
thought without recourse to any means 
but his own personality. He rarely falls 
back upon authority. He takes his pro- 
fession as seriously as does the doctor who 
studies every individual case in all its bear- 
ings in order to apply the medicine that 
will give the man every chance for health 
and happiness. A mere reference to au- 
thority is at once a display of personal 
weakness or ignorance; such reference 
should be used only as a last resort, and 
as standing behind or as a part of the man 
himself. That authority no doubt is in- 



128 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

dispensable. No man can safely and wisely 
use his own personality unless he knows 
that right is going to prevail, and stands, 
so to speak, at his elbow in plain sight of 
all his charges and embodied in the whole 
system of the school. And no school can 
do its duty without a definite and final ap- 
peal as the spirit of the whole body. And 
what is this appeal 1 Let us say again, and 
most distinctly, never any automatic pun- 
ishment; but somewhere in the institution 
a man whose word is final. Boys who are 
the ' ' pickles " of a school must come very 
soon to a wall of practical prohibition, and 
no such wall can be effectual that is not 
personified in the firm will of a man. Boys 
with a better earlier training or naturally 
more docile are in their own way just as 
much in need of a personal leader. To 
this one alone belongs the power of bring- 
ing all the forces of the school to bear upon 
the child. These forces, the final one of 
which is expulsion, will be differently 
worked by different men. An automatic 
system of merits and demerits, ending on 
one side with entrance into college and on 
the other with expulsion from school, is 
not worthy of consideration by any man 



DISCIPLINE 129 

who calls himself a teacher; yet a system 
of merits and demerits can be made a great 
help as a practical channel for the exer- 
cise of his power and personality. 

One who knew from long experience the 
necessity for the quick punishment of a 
fault as well as the necessity for always 
keeping plainly before the child the stand- 
ard of right and wrong, and one who knew 
the practical difficulties in the way of pun- 
ishments at schools, writes : 

" Punishments which exact much addi- 
tional work from the master are as impos- 
sible in a good school as punishments 
which exact much additional labor from 
the boy. The true solution of the great 
difficulty appears to lie finally in a school 
having many privileges, as long as work 
and behavior are good. Every privilege is 
a possible punishment, as it can be taken 
away. This is sometimes a severe inflic- 
tion." However, in some cases, this '' de- 
privation often lacks the one chief need 
in punishing: it is not quick enough. 

*' Quickness and certainty soon reduce 
the number of faults. Uncertainty and de- 
lay breed culprits. But something can be 
done. If bad marks carry punishment, 



130 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

good marks should cancel it. . . . Not 
what the fault deserves, but what will work 
best, is the teacher's problem. Many times 
a wise forgiveness has cured where punish- 
ment would have made worse. The over- 
matched man and the fool have their pun- 
ishments cut and dried, of the regulation 
pattern, and apply the official stamp with- 
out regard to anything but the actual fault. 
... A dead level of punishment is a griev- 
ous mistake. It leads boys to think that, 
however much they try, there is no escape, 
and accordingly they lose heart, and cease 
to try. Glimmerings of better things 
should be taken advantage of, and when 
honest praise can be awarded the battle is 
half won. ' ' 

Whatever the system, it should be, as far 
as possible, alive; while correcting each 
fault with patience by some timely device, 
at the same time always meeting half-way 
every effort on the boy's part. While per- 
sonal vigilance is absolutely necessary, tact 
in knowing just when to notice a fault is 
absolutely necessary in order to make the 
high standard held up by the system a 
standard to win adherents. The ordinary, 
every-day boy is to be trained to high 



DISCIPLINE 181 

ideals of work and conduct, and the ex- 
ceptional boy is not to be worried out of 
those peculiarities which, properly di- 
rected, become the source of future power. 
This exceptional boy is often the one most 
worth educating. Any place of education 
working a system that excludes the duf- 
fer or the pickle, or even the eccen- 
tric, can hardly be said to come up to 
the ideals of a Christian school. The 
centuries, if they have proved anything, 
have proved the unfairness as well as the 
foolishness of the world's ready esti- 
mate of what constitutes power in life. 
The slow and practical James, the trouble- 
some and even false and cowardly Peter, 
may have forces within them which any, 
school should be proud to educate, though 
it be with pain and travail. The growth of 
mental and moral vigor is as illusive and 
unsteady as the growth of the boy's body 
— more so ; it goes by fits and starts : that 
is, it seems to do so, though we get to 
know, after a time, that all the while in the 
dormant spirit are gathering forces of 
amazing power waiting only for some sig- 
nal gun. 

Therefore, while we must have a system, 



132 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

let us take care that it is not one that 
tends to neglect or expel the apparently 
weak or troublesome, but, on the contrary, 
one that patiently builds up the weak, and 
one that turns the active spirit to better 
things than teasing and mischief; in other 
words, a system that arouses the personal 
interest of every teacher for every child, 
and one that centres responsibility on re- 
sponsible men, narrowing gradually to the 
one father of the family ; a system that dis- 
courages appeals to authority — a system, 
however, that has the authority at hand; 
a system in which regulation punishments 
are reduced to a minimum — a system in 
which these punishments are wisely and 
justly and quickly administered in such a 
way as to build up a child and strengthen 
its good resolves, rather than to brow- 
beat its half-formed bad ones into final 
adoption. 

Let us sketch the practical details in such 
a system. 

As a preliminary to such a sketch, and 
also that we may at no time lose sight of 
our theme, I shall quote again from 
Thring's book, " The Theory and Practice 
of Teaching " : ' ' What you command, 



DISCIPLINE 133 

obey yourself most. Perhaps there is no 
more unsuspected source of misdeeds than 
the unconscious way in which many mas- 
ters break small laws, and disregard small 
observances. How often unpunctuality is 
fostered by a want of precision in the at- 
tendance of a master. Or his absence on 
some school occasion suggests that such 
public occasions are not worth coming to 
for their own sake, but are things to escape 
from if possible. 

' ' The boys extend the principle to things 
they wish to escape from; and no one sus- 
pects, least of all the delinquent master, 
that the heavy case of shirking which is 
tormenting him in his class is only an hum- 
ble but too successful copy of himself." 

If a man appreciates the force of his 
own example, if, in other words, he is fit 
to be a teacher, the most important feature 
in a system of discipline should be the en- 
couragement it gives a man to handle his 
own children without falling back upon 
authority. The more swing the teacher is 
allowed, the better is he able to do his 
own work. All men are bound to diif er in 
minor methods, and this fact should be 
candidly recognized so long as the results 



134 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

are in harmony with the ideals and gen- 
eral plan of the scheme. The main lines, 
however, on which to keep order and to 
get work out of children have been pretty 
well laid down in years gone by, and inex- 
perienced men will do well to note them. 

*' An ounce of prevention is worth a 
pound of cure. ' ' To avoid the cause or the 
occasion of disorder is, as a rule, far bet- 
ter than any remedy for correction. Love 
of fun, love of teasing, love of a fight, mere 
animal spirits, or, the more serious cause, 
vanity, are among the principal grounds 
for trouble. Therefore, we shall do well 
to avoid the occasions for the wrong dis- 
play of these various gifts of nature; or 
the occasion having arisen, to meet the 
cause of the trouble rather than the trouble 
itself. We shall meet love of fun by our 
own sense of humor; in fact, a quick 
and good-natured humor is a marvellous 
weapon in the hands of a teacher. To 
laugh with a boy is the next best thing to 
making him laugh with you. We shall 
meet his love of teasing by never rising 
to the bait; his love of a fight by never 
lowering ourselves even to argue or dis- 
pute; his animal spirits with a ready out- 



DISCIPLINE 135 

let on interesting work; his vanity by a 
well-tliouglit-out plan of denying the occa- 
sion for its display. Most disorder can be 
headed off by guarding the approaches and 
by providing beforehand for all possible 
emergencies. Is a man calling in a great 
body of boys to a schoolroom? After his 
manner of standing and ringing the bell 
— personal characteristics — come, first, the 
order and ventilation of the room itself; 
then, his own preparedness: that is, his 
care to have noted combinations and posi- 
tions of possible disturbers, so that his eye 
naturally and quietly lights on the first 
movement of the kind. Nothing so takes 
the spirit out of disorderly boys as to find 
the master always easily ahead. If a man 
cannot cultivate that habit of leadership 
which puts him and keeps him ahead of 
boys on their own lines, he had better 
never try to handle them in large bodies. 
Any self -disciplined man of ordinary abil- 
ity and presence can cultivate this habit of 
leadership. It only requires great care in 
details and wise following up of each fail- 
ure. *' John, you did not obey the signal 
promptly," or: ''You wasted your time 
last hour. When I come into this room 



136 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

again, you come straight to me and tell 
me that you remember what I have just 
said." And if he fails to remember, don't 
fail to remind him before you ring in 
again. Such ways of personal attention 
to the faults of individuals, to bring out 
their own better sides, pay for the trouble 
many times over in the consequent freedom 
from disorder. 

There is, even in the best ordered rooms, 
a chance for a spasmodic outburst, which 
may become more or less general accord- 
ing to circumstances and the preparedness 
of the master. A real joining in the laugh 
or a cool and quiet gesture or word will 
always restore order, unless some restless 
spirits have planned a little fun or a trial 
of a man's pluck and presence of mind. In 
this case, if there is danger of the whole 
body of boys getting out of hand, avoid 
threats and bullying, but quickly do some- 
thing ; pick out a leader here and there and 
tell him to take his books and study in 
your own room. I have sometimes quietly 
left the master's desk and stood about in 
different places and spoken in low tones 
to this one and that till the storm gradu- 
ally subsided, a storm which, if met by 



DISCIPLINE 137 

temper or irritation, would have wrecked a 
master's authority. One evening when the 
school was in very bad shape, there was a 
determined effort to turn the hour into 
bedlam. Not a word did I say, but I 
quickly took the floor and moved about ap- 
parently as carelessly as if everybody was 
hard at work, occasionally encouraging a 
boy to stick to his work. By the time the 
evening was over I had a very good idea 
of the different storm centres, and could 
have given with certainty the names of 
twenty-five boys who deserved punishment. 
However, before dismissal I said: '* I feel 
ashamed for the school that some of you 
have seemed determined to spoil the good 
order of the room, and I know that the 
larger number of you are also ashamed to 
see some fellows persistently annoying. 
Not one of you now in this room would be 
here if this sort of thing prevailed; you 
would not come to such a school; and I 
know that we can always count on the 
stronger fellows, when they come to their 
senses, to put down this kind of bad blood. 
I have been obliged to note the names of 
a number of fellows, who I know do not 
really believe in any sneaking disorder; 



138 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

and I should feel mucli relieved if they 
would come up and tell me that they have 
made a mistake." This brought a good- 
natured apology from almost every sus- 
pect, and also from many others. To one 
suspected boy leaving with no such ex- 
pression: " John, why don't you speak up? 
I don't like your carrying yourself off as if 
you did not care." 

*' I did not mean anything, sir." 
'' Then do not be afraid to say so. We 
must pull together, and trust each other." 
This episode is recalled simply to point 
out the application of the personal factor 
even in the little details of handling a large 
body of boys. There were about one hun- 
dred and seventy-five boys in that room, 
mostly all ready to take fire at anything, 
a crowd impossible to keep effectually 
at work unless a proper tone prevailed 
throughout. Absolute and fearless truth 
and square dealing is sometimes very hard 
to use on the spur of the moment when a 
man realizes that a mob is trying to rush 
him off his feet. But this same straight- 
forward truth is his only salvation as well 
as his duty to his charges; it will always 
win. Whether in the privacy of a man's 



DISCIPLINE 139 

own room or in tlie publicity of the school- 
room, boys will always respond to truth 
and bravery. It is remarkable how ready 
a boy will be to tell on himself. He will 
sometimes come and request to be allowed 
to stand a punishment. And, furthermore, 
boys of all ages will rise to a sense of re- 
sponsibility in putting down and, if need 
be, exposing meanness and trickery. If 
they are treated as " thieves," none are 
more careful in maintaining " honor 
among thieves." On the contrary, if they 
are treated in a perfectly honorable and 
open way, they are capable of exposing a 
thief and driving him from the community, 
not only a thief, but any pestilent fellow. 
The bell for afternoon study has rung. 
As the boys, one hundred little fellows, be- 
tween the ages of twelve and fifteen, come 
pouring into the room, fresh and lively 
from their afternoon play, it is soon evi- 
dent that something is up. A great blow- 
ing of noses and various noises indicative 
of disgust preannounce to the master the 
present arrival of a disagreeable odor. 
When it floated as far as his desk it cer- 
tainly proved its right of announcement. 
A few minutes quiet and good-humored 



140 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

repression brought study order. But be- 
fore dismissing the various classes, the 
master remarked : ' * Some one has spilled 
a very disagreeable concoction, and he 
owes us all an apology. He will please 
make his excuses to me at the end of the 
hour. ' ' As no excuse was forthcoming, the 
same master said, in the evening, before the 
good-night: " No one has spoken about 
that nasty smell; some stuff must have 
been spilled on purpose. "Will the monitors 
of the house please take up the matter at 
once. We do not like to be treated that 
way." After a short meeting, conducted 
entirely by themselves, the four or five 
monitors reported that it was their opinion 
that the fellow should be sent up at once. 
*' Very well, I am perfectly willing to let 
the matter drop or not, just as you decide, 
but it seems to me wiser, as you say, to 
have the boy come and explain himself." 
Accordingly, sorely against his will, a boy, 
new to the house and the ways of the place, 
was ushered into the master's study to 
'' explain himself." At first he was very 
sulky, but when he found that it was not 
for the sake of punishment, he gradually 
thawed out and confessed that he was the 



DISCIPLINE 141 

importer of a species of German toy, a 
kind of pellet, made on purpose to throw 
and burst with this peculiar odor. When 
required, he frankly delivered up his sup- 
ply and nothing more was said on the 
subject. 

Now this may seem a very trivial matter, 
and it is ; but unless these trivial matters, 
by which sneaking mischief upsets the 
whole body, are promptly and effectively 
disposed of, certain boys will find their 
greatest pleasure in such pranks. The ex- 
citement becomes all the greater if there 
is a * ' to do, " and an effort to discover and 
punish the perpetrator. A master is ut- 
terly helpless if the mob instincts of a body 
of boys are aroused. In a school poorly 
governed it may happen that a man has 
no alternative but some kind of general 
punishment. Of course, it is always bet- 
ter not to pit oneself against the whole 
body; if it is possible, make a division, 
pick out a section or a class. Yet the prin- 
ciple is a true one, that in the same way 
as the result of the honor or good behavior 
of the few is to be shared by all, the result 
of the dishonor or bad behavior of a few 
should be shared by all. If, moreover, it 



142 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

comes to the exacting of punisliinent from 
a body of boys for concerted disorder, the 
wise master will detain himself with the 
crowd rather than allow any punishment to 
fall on the few who refrain from " lying 
out of it," or to fall unshared on wholly 
innocent boys. ' ' I am innocent, but I shall 
serve this detention with all those whom 
I keep in, as I know that some of you are 
innocent. All sitting in that section where 
the disturbance arose will meet me for a 
quiet half -hour together after dinner. Do 
not come to me with any excuses. I do not 
wish to hear who did or who didn't. We 
are all hurt by that kind of underhand dis- 
order, and we shall all take the conse- 
quences. ' ' But when they have assembled : 
* ' Now, I suppose at least twenty boys were 
implicated in this tr'ouble; what fifteen 
boys will take the punishment and let the 
others go? " With a few furtive glances 
about, by degrees fifteen hands are cau- 
tiously displayed. When the half-hour is 
up, ' ' Now you may go, but if it would ease 
any one's mind, I should be pleased to hear 
from each just what he did. ' ' 

** I groaned, sir." 

" I made a noise with my feet." 



DISCIPLINE 143 

And so on till every hoy liad made liis 
confession, and gone out smiling. So 
ready are boys to lie in concert, yet indi- 
vidually to tell the truth and to take the 
consequences. But this kind of way of 
making a tone would never be necessary in 
a well-ordered school. In a place where 
the best boys are marked as leaders, under 
men who love their work, I cannot con- 
ceive of an occasion arising where it would 
be necessary to force in this way the crea- 
tion of proper public spirit. Though a 
large schoolroom is a difficult problem in 
which to work the personal factor, as it is 
a sort of open sea for the play of storms 
and squalls originating under the torrid or 
freezing atmosphere of other channels of 
school-life, yet the personal factor, even 
there, is an absolute necessity. And, no 
matter how well ordered the school at 
large, the continued order of a large 
schoolroom is absolutely dependent on the 
personality of the man in charge. Lots of 
men who do well in class and in other parts 
of the school cannot keep their heads 
among so many. Sometimes the whole 
body will be so charged as to explode at 
the smallest spark. Then there must be 



144 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

somewhere the iron door to hold the fire in 
check, or there willbe loss of life, — and 
that door must be a person. 

The classroom is a more satisfactory 
place for the use of personal methods in 
discipline. Let us see: the person, of 
course, is again the main thing. Next to 
the person comes the room, its ventilation, 
and the convenience and order of its ar- 
rangements. A class entering a room 
should not only see, but breathe cleanli- 
ness and order. Dishonor to the room and 
its furniture soon begets dishonor to the 
work. Occasions for confusion, especially 
at the beginning of the hour, should be 
avoided, and the work be so arranged as 
at once to win attention. A famous Ger- 
man teacher used to say, " Unless I can 
command perfect order by the interest of 
my lesson, I am not fit to be a teacher." 
Notice the word '' command." The atten- 
tion of the lazy, inattentive, or playful boy 
is commanded simply by a cunning appli- 
cation of the work in hand. A thorough 
study of individuals and a command of 
one 's own voice and manner will insure for 
a teacher the handling of his work in such 
a way as eventually to command perfect 



DISCIPLINE 145 

order. An air of confidence coupled with 
unremitting attention to the lesson goes 
far toward making every boy feel that his 
interruptions are a nuisance to his fellows. 
As the laggards trail in, they will find the 
lesson already well started, or the master 
at the board demonstrating something with 
interest and apparent oblivion of their 
tardiness. Questions scattered around 
among the careless soon pull things to- 
gether. Perhaps the master's back is 
turned and he is writing or figuring, ex- 
plaining as he goes; he knows the spirit 
that is making a small disturbance or the 
voice that is persistent with untimely ques- 
tion, and he remarks quietly, as he writes, 
" Jack, I don't really believe that you want 
me to stop to attend to you." Perhaps 
Jack needs a further and more distinct 
snub. Turning and pointing to a part of the 
board as much as possible out of sight of 
the class, ''Go to the board and do ex- 
ample 10 as well as you can," or, " Write 
for us your best translation of lines 
75-80." 

" I can't do it, sir." 

" I am sorry; then, just make a clear 
copy of the Latin," — anything to cool his 



146 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

vanity, and give the general impression of 
the necessity for work. A few words after 
class to one who has been troublesome dur- 
ing the hour often give a boy just the 
necessary turn. Eeproof that interrupts 
the work or calls the attention of others 
to a restless, vain, or nervous child is a 
mistake. Any kind of collision where the 
love of opposition is gratified should be 
relegated to those opportunities where the 
culprit can be dealt with quietly, swiftly, 
with little chance of failure, and, if possi- 
ble, in such a spirit as to win him from be- 
ing an opponent to being a friend. A word 
in season, that is, at a time when the 
child's defences are down, appealing to 
some higher motive; a kind reproof 
coupled with words of help and encourage- 
ment — all such means are far superior to 
any show of authority. Argument and 
scolding are as worthless as they are 
wasteful of good fire. Threats and de- 
mands for promises of reform are worse. 
Before a man has come to that point he 
had better turn over his charge to the next 
in authority. A set meeting in one 's study 
is generally the signal to the boy for a 
complete putting on of his armor; an 



DISCIPLINE 147 

under-master must be very sure of himself 
and of his boy before lie dare hale a culprit 
to his sanctum. Let him keep that for his 
friends and for those whom he is sure to 
make his friends. A lecture ending with- 
out mutual understanding, within the four 
walls of a man's own room, with all his 
home pictures and other personal fringes 
hitting a boy in the face, is a pretty sure 
way to place a permanent barrier to his 
heart. When severity is necessary, the 
empty classroom is a more fitting place. 
As the class is leaving: 
'' Tom, stay in your seat." 

Then a few minutes of absolute disre- 
gard of the boy by the man, who is busy 
correcting work, may bring forth this 
conversation : 

^' Why, Tom, what are you doing 
here? " 

*' You told me to stay, sir." 

" Why did I tell you to stay? " 

'^ Because I spoke out, I suppose." 

" Is that all you did? " 

'' Yes, sir." 

' * Would I keep you in just for speaking 
out? " 

*' You did, sir." 



148 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

^' Have I not told you a great many 
times that you interrupt our workf " 

" Yes, sir." 

*' Then it seems as if you did not care.** 

" I do care." 

*' I know you do. I just want you to 
stop and think a minute. Good-bye ! ' ' 

The cunning devices that a man may use 
to win attention and bring a child to his 
right mind are as varied as the characters 
of men and children. 

The time comes, however, now and 
again, when a man may feel that patience 
can no longer do her perfect work. Do not 
then delay, but promptly turn the whole 
matter over to your superior, with no 
strings to your report; let the bare facts 
of the case suffice, so there may be no 
chance for the exercise of personal resent- 
ment. How common it is to hear a teacher 
admit that he is having trouble with a 
certain boy! A man should never allow 
himself to be in such a position with any 
child. Such an admission on his part com- 
pels his abdication from the position of 
master. When a case is referred to a su- 
perior, again it is to win the boy, not to 
enforce a punishment; and the teacher 



DISCIPLINE 149 

should show this by his whole manner. The 
head-master, from his position, should 
know many things about the boy unknown 
to his assistants, and also has it in his 
power to bring forces to bear on the boy 
other than a regulation punishment. 

But, after all is said and done, it is 
hardly conceivable that a school should be 
able to dispense with some regular, recog- 
nized form of punishment. Such punish- 
ment, however, should evidently be under 
the direct control of the head of the school, 
and never allowed to drift into a merely 
automatic system. Every report for mis- 
conduct or failure in duty, emanating from 
an under-master, should go to one in direct 
authority over the boy, to the one who 
knows as far as possible all the circum- 
stances of the child's life. In a large 
school the labor of inspecting every report 
might be very great ; therefore, the system 
should be such as to enable the head-master 
so to delegate this work to house-masters 
that not only might he spare himself un- 
necessary labor more easily done by others, 
but might be enabled to leave the school 
for a time with no appreciable difference 
in the working of the system. 



150 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

The subject of excuses deserves careful 
consideration in any system, sucli careful 
consideration that children may learn not 
to make excuses. The effort to be perfectly 
just, and the temptation to win good will, 
dictates generally too great leniency in 
granting excuses. The ideal would be such 
care on the part of masters before sending 
in reports that no excuses would be con- 
sidered. Furthermore, such a harmful 
thing for a child is the habit of seeking to 
excuse himself, and so necessary for us all 
to learn to take manfully even apparent 
injustice, that of the two evils to be 
avoided, the excuse habit is worse than the 
occasional miscarriage of justice. While 
it is worth while to meet half-way a boy's 
own sense of justice and truth, it is our 
bounden duty to educate his sense of jus- 
tice and truth to the highest level, and also 
to teach him to suffer, if need be, unjustly 
for the sake of others. A small boy, stand- 
ing in front of me and his eyes flashing 
defiance, says: 

" I won't do it; it isn't fair.'* 

" Just sit down a minute ; there is a book 
to look at while I finish a few lines that I 
am writing." 



DISCIPLINE 151 

After a pause of, say, five minutes, while 
my pen is moving, but my heart praying 
that I may win that boy : 

'' No, it does not seem fair to you, nor is 
it fair to me to stay in during this beauti- 
ful day because others have failed. The 
little thing which you did arose simply 
from the wrongdoing of several other fel- 
lows; a man cannot see and know every- 
thing; your master did the best he knew 
how. I want you to learn to take a little 
injustice now and then, and to bear with 
me some of the troubles of other fellows. 
You know how often you deserve punish- 
ment and do not get it; in the long run, 
the well-mannered, square boy gets his 
due.v 

" All right, sir, I'll do it, but it isn't 
fair," will almost surely come from his 
lips; and you have taken one step nearer 
your goal with that youngster. It is won- 
derful how a few minutes' quiet with a 
man who is a friend will give the best side 
of a boy a chance to assert itself. 

This brings us to the consideration of 
the forms of punishment to be used by 
those in authority. Whatever task is set 
for a punishment should be one worth 



152 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

while in itself. Experience bears me out 
in asserting that only two kinds of penalty 
are practical in a school other than mili- 
tary: namely, writing lines and walking. 
The latter, of course, is the better theo- 
retically, but practically a combination of 
both is advisable. When a stated punish- 
ment is resorted to, it makes little differ- 
ence in its deterrent effect what that pun- 
ishment is, so long as the child's liberty is 
absolutely curtailed. Walking is a good 
set punishment, because it keeps the child 
in the air and should put him in better 
shape, if the exercise is carefully guarded 
and made disciplinary. A great many 
boys can be kept walking in a line around 
a quad or back lot, with the under- 
standing that a certain number of times 
around at a fixed pace constitute the stint : 
a half -hour is about the limit during which 
to make this a successful punishment. 
Boys who have longer detentions should 
then turn into the schoolroom to do 
copy: that is, to copy neatly so many lines 
in such a time from a history or English 
book. This is practical and in itself a 
helpful exercise; and I do not believe any 
higher mental exercises practical. One 



DISCIPLINE 15S 

hour, however, of indoor detention should 
be a limit. If further detention is required, 
it should be done again in the open air. 

In all regulation punishment or regula- 
tion demerits, it is helpful to have regu- 
lation credits given for periods of entire 
freedom from reports for misconductj 
Yet here again, to obtain the best results 
the personal factor is important — that the 
boy should be obliged to face duty in the 
person of a superior for every demerit or 
credit. These things should not be allowed 
to pile up for future settling. The child 
who requires much discipline does little 
reasoning. Nothing is accomplished by 
holding over him future punishment, or 
by assuming that such and such results 
are ' ^ up to the boy ' ' to foresee and guard 
against. He should arrive as quickly as 
possible up against a wall. 

Discipline at boarding school will al- 
ways be a problem. The ideal professional 
parent can never expect to attain to the 
ideal natural parent. But do not let any 
of us think that it can be settled by ma- 
chinery. ' ' Life for life ; ' ' the heart can 
be won only by heart's blood, never by 
blows and browbeating. I once heard a 



154 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

noted school-master speaking in praise of 
his detention system, '' Oh! it is a great 
system, it breaks a boy down in the end ' ' ; 
and another, '^ My plan is just to keep his 
nose to the grindstone." Yes, these are 
ideas still held and practised in our Chris- 
tian schools, greatly to our shame and dis- 
grace. There are cases, I suppose, where the 
animal must be broken, but I do not 
recall the successful application of school 
discipline in such a case during an expe- 
rience of over twenty-five years. The 
forceful, loving will of a patient man or 
woman standing for truth and justice, is 
the only thing that I have ever seen able to 
produce salutary fear. 



VIII 

THE CLASS 

IN his class the man is king, or the 
teacher must flee. 

'' I am looking for an under-teacher. I 
want first a man, and next a man to teach," 
remarked a head-master; of such impor- 
tance in the classroom is the personality 
of the teacher. 

Dean Briggs, who reports this remark, 
says, in another place : ' ' In the best 
teacher, also, is a personal force that in- 
spires some boys with the desire to work 
and compels others to work, till working 
becomes a precious, even a priceless, habit 
of their lives. He is not full of devices and 
patent appliances for interesting his pu- 
pils; he is not full of theories and fads: 
he does his own work, even the drudgery 
of it, with enthusiasm for it and for his 
calling. He corrects, chastens, guides, 
kindles the love of learning; and con- 
155 



156 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

stantly he gives to eager eyes some 
glimpses of that high enjoyment to which 
learning and discipline may lead: but he 
never sacrifices the discipline to any royal 
road of pleasure." 

In the class there is a peculiar force to 
personality, inasmuch as there are all the 
different personalities to be dealt with in 
such a way as to cause the force exerted on 
each to be equal to the sum of the best 
of all the parts. A man who can get the 
good will and attention of his class is ex- 
erting on every boy the force of truth not 
only through his own personality, but 
through that of the several and combined 
personalities of all the others; not only 
that a truth is turned and looked at on 
many sides, but it is as if twenty voices 
were appealing to each boy's mind to open, 
to hear, and to work. A word spoken to 
a whole body of peojjle, when their minds 
move in comparative concert, makes an 
impression far stronger than the same 
word spoken to one alone. Call it what you 
please, hypnotic power or magnetism in 
the leader that starts the thought trans- 
ference, the larger the number held by the 
spell the more imx^elling the call to every 



THE CLASS ' 157 

mind. The whole equation, therefore, is 
the resultant of the unifying of these many 
forces into one line of thought and work 
by the skilled teacher. And this fact is 
very important for every teacher to grasp, 
for these separate minds and wills, with- 
out any leader, naturally unify into a hope- 
less mass of inattention and laziness, if 
not of absolute rebellion. 

For the child, the class training should 
be one of great value in many ways, not 
the least of which should be the gain in 
power not only to get for himself the best 
that is given broadcast, so to speak, but 
also to add his share to the general good. 
Some children with excellent abilities seem 
to require the constant eye and personal 
attention of the teacher to be centred on 
them, or they fail to take in the explana- 
tion. The effort should be to turn this 
vanity, or dependence, or whatever it may 
be, into the kind of self-respect that is 
ashamed to be the exception, and glories in 
being an addition to, instead of a sub- 
traction from, his class. 

We come, therefore, to the consideration 
of the real object that the teacher sets be- 
fore himself and his class: namely, the 



158 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

training to think and to work with others 
and for others in such a way as to stimu- 
late thought. '' The teacher and the 
trainer has to make his pupil strong, and 
skilful in himself, to direct existing pow- 
ers, and call new powers into existence. 
The learner does not want to be made a 
receptacle of other men's words and 
thoughts, but to be made a thinker of 
thoughts, and a wielder of words himself. 
It is true that material must be collected or 
there can be no thought; and that the 
thinker, as Aristotle says, must learn to 
become a skilled workman by working at 
that in which his skill is afterwards to be 
shown; so far knowledge is necessary." 
Thus writes the great Thring, and he con- 
tinues in the same connection: " To ap- 
proach the question from another side : the 
possession of great knowledge is given but 
to few. The average of general efficiency 
is alone worth considering in dealing with 
what teaching and training can do. Here 
there neither is, nor can be any doubt. 
Workmen are wanted. The work of the 
world cannot get on without worlanen. . . . 
The need of the world at any moment is 
not wealth — that is the result of work fin- 



THE CLASS 159 

ished and done; but work and workers — 
that is the living power and skill that con- 
tinue to produce; . . . without the pro- 
ducing power, how poor, how impossible 
prolonged possession becomes. . . . The 
ordinary mind with the ordinary memory 
cannot accumulate wealth of knowledge, 
and is but a poor shop; whilst it can be 
trained to do very good work, and turned 
out in the world-market a skilled workman 
at high wages. Few have time at their 
command to pile in knowledge. And there 
is little room for many such accumulators. 
In fact, a great memory is a great maker 
of common-place, unless overmatched by 
much original power; and the attempt to 
load the mind with knowledge often means 
crowding out all originality and freshness, 
and putting very little in. ' ' Yet this same 
attempt to impart knowledge beyond neces- 
sity is a great temptation to a teacher. 
Children are naturally alive to anything 
new; they love to listen to the man who 
tells them things. A class may easily be 
turned into a mutual admiration society, 
where the teacher displays his knowledge 
and his art at imparting this knowledge, 
and where the children sit in rapt atten- 



160 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

tion at the display. One is tempted to 
wonder at the quality of work done in a 
classroom from which comes daily the al- 
most uninterrupted flow of the teacher's 
voice. Lecturing is not teaching, no mat- 
ter how interesting to young and old. Lis- 
tening to explanations and dissertations 
goes far toward training children to mental 
imbecility, unless absolutely necessary as 
ground for work. Most of the lecturing in 
the class, whose duty is training in effi- 
ciency, can better be done by drawing out 
explanations from the children and by 
leading them, as far as possible, to dis- 
cover and deduce the necessary knowledge 
for themselves. 

" All the world knows Socrates," to 
quote again from the same inspiring 
teacher. '' Many schools of philosophy, 
and a countless number of paths of re- 
search, and a countless number of learned 
men/, owe their existence to Socrates. Soc- 
rates was a great teacher; but in moderr> 
phrase he taught nothing. Socrates is 
judged to be the greatest teacher the secu- 
lar world ever had; but he poured no 
knowledge in, whether by pumping on 
kettles open or shut. Socrates gave a de- 



THE CLASS 161 

scription of himself as a teacher. He 
describes himself as a man-midwife for 
mind; who assisted other people to bring 
into the world new births of mind. What 
a noble, yet simple, definition of what all 
teaching should contemplate — new births 
of mind. He created a science of question- 
ing, which to this hour bears his name; 
but the answers were theoretically already 
in the persons questioned. His system pre- 
supposed material gathered, but material 
gathered in order to make the after-struc- 
ture of thought." 

Now this temptation to the teacher to 
pump knowledge on his class has its friend 
and follower: namely, the temptation to 
prepare a class for an examination. No 
apology is necessary for continuing the 
quotation, as will readily be admitted, 
when viewed in its bearing on some of our 
modern methods. ^' His questions have 
been searching the world ever since they 
were put into it, and have quickened the 
perception of all generations ; but Socrates 
could not have produced a single pupil able 
to show a modern examiner what he had 
gained; or to satisfy (satisfy, we call it) 
an examiner's demand for knowledge in a 



162 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

modern examination paper. In the first 
place, Socrates imparted no knowledge at 
all; and examinations have knowledge as 
their work and aim. Socrates, therefore, 
would be nowhere in an examiner's speci- 
men list. Socrates again scornfully re- 
jected everything of the Manual type, and 
all cut and dried rules and formulas, but 
these are the stock in trade of competitive 
examinations. Socrates therefore would 
starve in the enlightened nineteenth cen- 
tury as a teacher; there is no room for 
teachers." (We are hoping better things 
for the twentieth century.) '' He would 
have to wear shoes, and make them for a 
livelihood. On the other hand, Socrates 
the teacher, not the shoemaker, applied so 
subtle an instrument of mind by his ques- 
tions to all he met that he forced them to 
sift and arrange their ideas. Socrates the 
teacher sent a plough into the hearts of 
men, and broke up the ground, and then 
followed with living breath of strange 
efficacy, like a spring wind, and called out 
into new existence all the latent germinat- 
ing power, all the push of life within. 
Socrates sent new longings, and new ca- 
pacities for satisfying longings, into his 



THE CLASS 163 

disciples, not new knowledge in the modem 
sense: and the receptive mind gathered 
strength and clearness, felt its want, and 
eagerly set about supplying it. So it came 
to pass that Socrates, who taught nothing, 
produced disciples that learnt everything." 

The teacher, therefore, is the sower of 
seed, not the feeder of ripened fruit; the 
cultivator of the soil, to make the mind 
eager and receptive; the happy workman, 
who by the contagion of his own example 
wins his pupils to work with him. 

Though we believe that the true work 
of a teacher is better appreciated than in 
the days of Thring, yet the very helps be- 
ing put forth in these days in the way of 
text-books are a constant temptation, and 
teachers need to be on their guard against 
the same old enemy that would feed us 
direct from the Tree of Knowledge. New 
and perfected text-books are all very well 
if they are taken, first, as aids to the 
teacher to think himself, to get his own 
hand firmly on the Tree of Life, and to lift 
each child just far enough to get hold and 
climb for himself; and, then, as aids to 
teach his pupils to think. But I have seen 
a good and conscientious man almost kill 



164 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

the desire for any real intellectual life on 
the part of his pupils ; turned, as it were, 
into a kind of clerk of the works, ^ ' whose 
main business it is to make the workers 
tie up little packages of rules, label them 
neatly, docket them, and pack them into 
the pigeon-holes of memory, to be brought 
out whenever asked for, pat! This state 
of things produces grammars also bris- 
tling with technical terms, labels for every- 
thing, endless lists of endless usages, all 
with their separate names; because a 
name, whether understood or not, can be 
produced at call, when the simple princi- 
ple, by which the thought takes shape in 
words, would very often explain them all 
without the need of names; but then this 
cannot be learnt as a lesson by rote by 
forty boys at a time. . . . 

*' As soon as individual minds are not 
the province of a teacher's work, nor each 
separate difficulty his care, as soon as 
knowledge, rules, and memory engross at- 
tention, numbers are immaterial. There 
is the prescribed packet to be learnt; if 
a boy does not learn it, it is no business 
of the clerk of the works, beyond punish- 
ing him for not doing it. This soon passes 



THE CLASS 165 

into a neglect of those who cannot, or will 
not, pigeon-hole the daily quota; this nat- 
urally advances to finding them very much 
in the way ; the next step is that in the in- 
terest of the better boys (so runs the 
story) they must be got rid of. So the 
school failures are turned out, and great 
authority quoted to support the practice; 
and all the energy of the place is ex- 
pended on the strong and active, who will 
distinguish themselves in the knowledge 
scramble. ' ' 

The examination certainly has its legiti- 
mate place in the school, as has the ac- 
quiring of knowledge,. but the teacher must 
ever hold before himself that the one thing 
for which the class is assembled before him 
is to learn, collectively and individually, 
to think. Even accuracy is at times to 
be sacrificed to progress in thought. We 
have seen this progress paralyzed by a 
wrong stress on accuracy. To think is the 
first thing, even though the thought be 
hardly intelligible; and then comes the 
training in accuracy, when the child is 
taught to express the thought. The same 
authority as quoted above remarks in this 
connection: " There is something so wise, 



166 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

so unanswerable, in tlie modest, yet firm, 
requirement that the lessons must be done 
thoroughly, and a boy not advance till he 
has mastered what he is doing, that the 
request commands assent at once; there 
is also so real a truth underlying the dic- 
tum that the fallacy involved in it easily 
escapes notice. The fallacy is, — it cannot 
be done. There is no power in the minds 
of the young to master a subject thor- 
oughly. Thorough mastery is the result 
of trained skill, and it is absurd to demand 
the perfection of trained skill from the 
untrained beginner. The map-work which 
transfers to the mind a complete plan of 
the country belongs to men; it is enough, 
and more than enough, if the boy can find 
his way about fairly well, and appreciate 
the landscape. Any attempt to linger too 
long over the same work will only end in 
weariness and deadening the interest. 
Words and work, when stale, become to 
the young mere empty sounds, meaningless 
rote-work. There must be change. Loose- 
ness indeed is fatal. What is known ought 
to be known with exactness; but a gap is 
no harm, unless it is in the middle of the 
main highway. Monotony is the greatest 



THE CLASS 167 

enemy a teacher has to deal with. There 
is much danger, where all is new, as it is 
with beginners, lest a boy find a dead level 
without landmarks to guide. Where all 
is new, all cannot be mastered, and in the 
first confusion, unless he moves on, there 
is nothing to show what is intended to be 
done, or where he is to go. . . . Many dif- 
ficulties in learning cannot be mastered by 
standing still over them; they can only 
be got rid of by movement." 

In teaching to think, one cannot begin 
too early to encourage and train to prac- 
tical expression the power of originality. 
Many of the present-day systems, both in 
work and play, discourage initiative on the 
part of the child. Without entering into 
a discussion on the true balance of indi- 
viduality and the sinking of individuality 
in the common good, we may here take it 
for granted that the best interests of all 
men demand the highest development of 
each; and this, of course, demands the 
training of initiative in every child. Great 
patience and tact on the part of the 
teacher are required in order to train 
some children in originality and, at the 
same time, in proper submission to and 



168 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

consideration of others ; but if that is what 
the man is looking for rather than perfec- 
tion in set work, his joy at the discovery 
of great possibilities in children, and in 
training such rare ones to usefulness, is 
not the least part of his reward. More- 
over, their self-expression becomes an ex- 
ample and an incentive to every member 
of a class. The plodder and the genius 
must learn to work side by side, to respect 
one another, and to add, each his share, to 
the common good by patient toil. 

We have touched upon all these points 
in earlier chapters, but their great impor- 
tance is a sufficient excuse for their repeti- 
tion. The classroom, as well as every 
other part of the school, should teach close 
application, not to the mere acquiring of 
set lessons or to the * ' putting in " of cer- 
tain hours, but directly to the formation 
of habits of industry. It is evidently, 
therefore, the first duty of the teacher, in 
season and out of season, by precept and 
example, to teach his children how to 
work; and this can be done in some cases 
only at great personal sacrifice. 

In the class, gossip of any sort, references 
to discipline or to any matter not bearing 



THE CLASS 169 

directly on the work in hand, should be 
avoided. The attention of every indi- 
vidual is what the teacher should aim at; 
and this comes only to the man who is giv- 
ing his best attention to every individual. 
'^ The boy mind," says Thring, " is much 
like a frolicking puppy, always in motion, 
restless, but never in the same position 
two minutes together, when really awake. 
Naturally his body partakes of this unset- 
tled character. Attention is a lesson to be 
learned; and quite as much a matter of 
training as any other lesson. A teacher 
will be saved much useless friction if he 
acknowledges this fact, and instead of ex- 
pecting attention, which he will not get, 
starts at once with the intention of teach- 
ing it; being well assured that it would 
be just as sensible to look for the Latin 
Grammar to be spun off the reel by the 
light of nature, without book, as for atten- 
tion to be got without training. A teacher 
will teach this as a lesson, and will exer- 
cise all his skill in teaching it, and be pa- 
tient with beginners, and command it by 
life, good-humor, and go. ... A sleepy 
manner, however strong the real interest 
taken by the master may be, produces in 



170 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

the taught either laziness and apathy in 
the lazy, or tricks in the puppy section. 
It is most disastrous in anything belong- 
ing to discipline to overlook beginnings. 
No leak ever broke up a dyke more cer- 
tainly than trifles passed over break up the 
order of a class. There is, however, a 
worse fault still, a fault which is almost 
universal: this is, to legalize insubordina- 
tion by having a set of small routine pun- 
ishments, and imposing them regularly. 
This makes a regular crop of the fault; 
and the fault becomes an established insti- 
tution, and what began as a bit of careless- 
ness ends by being a tolerated crime. Lit- 
tle breaches of order ought to be met by 
the personal authority of the teacher's 
words and influence. If that is not enough, 
they should be promptly stamped out by 
real severity. 

" Inattention creeps in at another door. 
The operators are apt to forget the class, 
which is their real work, and to be ab- 
sorbed in the book and the boy doing it, 
whilst the rest are comparatively disre- 
garded. The rest accordingly are inat- 
tentive, for the operator is teaching them 
inattention by being inattentive to them. 



THE CLASS 171 

They are his main care, and not to care 
for them brings its own punishment in not 
being cared for. First one, then another, 
takes advantage of the absent eye, and dis- 
order begins, and in spite of spasmodic 
severity becomes the rule. Instant, watch- 
ful — if need be, pitiless — repression of the 
first sign of inattention is the only law of 
discipline. Nothing ought to escape a 
teacher that the boys do, for he is there 
to train the boys in what they do. ... As 
mind has to be dealt with, mind must be 
there. And however clever the performer 
may be, he might as well stand up, and 
solemnly set about giving a lesson to the 
clothes of the class hanging round his 
room on pegs, while the owners were play- 
ing cricket, as to the so-called class, if the 
boys are careless, playing, or noisy. Cul- 
pable inattention in the boys is above all 
things a master's fault. Able, earnest 
men, who attend to the class, will always 
find the class attend to them." 

The diiference between sitting over 
books and an eager desire to make the 
most of his time must occasionally be 
plainly pointed out to a boy. How to learn 
must be drilled into him to the destruction 



172 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

of his delusions about work. We often see 
a fine conscientious boy making himself 
stupid and unhappy over work that he can 
be taught to do easily and happily. 

There are what may be called mechan- 
ical agencies which are a great help; a 
well-lighted and well-ventilated room in 
which the best appliances are found for 
work: the class so arranged as to have 
every boy as nearly as possible face the 
teacher, so that he can keep them well be- 
fore him in a compact body, thus easily 
looking into each boy's face to see if he 
is following the work: the position of 
every boy while supposedly at work. A 
teacher will not neglect this law of nature, 
that position of body is not only an index 
of mind, but a decided influence in itself. 
*' Few suspect," as has been well said, 
** how much the waters of Helicon are 
contaminated by the slime which oozes in 
through this unguarded sluice." 

Finally, too long detention, either in 
school or out of school, completely unfits 
a boy for attention. Let any candid 
teacher test his own ability to stick closely 
at work which requires push for the length 
of time for which even our children of ten 



THE CLASS 173 

and twelve are detained at school; let any 
candid teacher ask himself if he has found 
it possible to train children to attention 
who are kept over their books eight hours 
a day. Every man of experience knows 
the answer to these questions, and yet 
what is the remedy that we see applied to 
the inattentive, slack- twisted boy? More 
detention! Our schools will continue to 
turn out their crop of formal dunces and 
men looking for '' easy snaps," till every 
teacher fairly faces and works over the 
problem, '' How am I going to teach that 
child attention and love for his work? " 

There is another phase of classwork 
which does not, as a rule, get its true val- 
uation: that is, the work assigned to be 
done outside the class by the boy himself. 
It is evident, no amount of precept for an 
hour a day will counterbalance the force 
of habit acquired in the other hours. The 
pressure brought to bear on both teacher 
and pupil to produce ' ' the tale of bricks, ' ' 
forces good, square, honest study out of 
the market. The boy will gather his 
'* straw " anywhere and everywhere from 
the handiest source — friendly teachers, 
companions, or even on the sly from an- 



174 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

other's stock. A friend of mine, who was 
a great stickler for all the work perfectly, 
done, received a Greek exercise one day, 
beautifully and on the whole correctly 
written, but the last sentence consisted of 
another boy's name written in Greek char- 
acters. Even this incident failed to con- 
vince the teacher that he himself was the 
one most in error. The daily habit of 
facing work to be done with no help except 
what his own master has given him, and 
the doing his best on that work, is half, if 
not all, the battle for a teacher to win in 
behalf of the child. By constantly keep- 
ing that before the young, and by skilful 
arrangement of the work to be prepared, 
and by following up and exposing all the 
crutches that the lame ones will seize, the 
pupil himself soon learns to appreciate 
the power that he is gaining, and a strong 
spirit of self-help will take possession of 
a class. If there is one thing that appeals 
to the best side of a boy, it is his ambition 
not to be a lame player or a quitter or a 
sneak. Young people need to have their 
sense of honor as well as their desire for 
work to be diligently trained. The ideal 
which each boy has in his mind, if we are 



THE CLASS 175 

to judge by the standards they invariably 
apply to their elders, is strong enough and 
fairly clear; the task of the teacher is to 
train the child in the application of this 
standard to himself. The man who allows 
those under his direction to form the habit 
of doing their outside work by any method 
but that which is most conducive to their 
advancement in power to work and think, 
is manifestly not doing his full duty. It 
would be just as wise for a doctor to pre- 
scribe his medicines without making any 
real effort to get at the seat of the trouble 
in the daily life of his patient, and to see 
that his remedies were conscientiously 
used. 

Encourage a child, therefore, to come 
to class with his work done by himself as 
well as he is able; then he will be keen to 
discover his mistakes and to note their cor- 
rection. He will be learning not only how 
to work, but learning the kind of child he 
actually is, and also that other inestimable 
lesson of standing squarely on his own 
work. When a child needs outside help, his 
teacher should be the first to know it and 
to offer the help. "■ Prevention is better 
than cure;" it is better as a rule to give 



176 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

the necessary help before class and accus- 
tom the boy to come prepared, than to 
allow him to waste his time and then pun- 
ish him afterwards. There are, however, 
instances of inattention that are better to 
punish by refusing further help and allow- 
ing the boy to suffer for a day or more 
while he flounders in darkness. Some- 
times nothing is so good for the careless 
child playing on the edge of thin ice as 
to allow him to fall in, and to know him- 
self temporarily out of the game and at 
length dependent for his life on taking ^ 
firm hold of the proffered stick. The sort 
of boy that needs outside help needs 
mostly to be shown how to study, and 
sometimes requires to be made to study. 
Of all boys, this one needs the personal 
supervision of his teacher. If the garden- 
er's apprentice is lazy and slovenly in his 
work, he would never learn as simple a 
thing as sticking at his own row till it was 
clear of weeds, root and vine, unless at 
times the gardener came and worked be- 
side him. Perhaps it is not more direction 
which he needs, but just the influence of a 
little personal fellowship. It is no use say- 
ing to him, *' Unless you learn to work, 



THE CLASS 177 

you will starve." Let the starving proc- 
ess be at once judiciously yoked with the 
fellowship. To the discouraged or lazy 
and obstinate boy, if we wish to make him 
a hopeful, energetic, and amenable man, 
we shall not say, ^' Go and do that work," 
but we shall rather say, " Come and let 
us do this work." See that the work is 
done and that the boy, as far as in him lies, 
does it himself. 

A friend of mine, a man who had much 
experience on certain lines of work in the 
business world, said: " I shall not send 
niy boy to college. I want him to know 
not books, but men and things; and this 
knowledge he will get to more advantage 
by dealing directly with men and things." 
Such a conclusion is perfectly justified 
from the results of school and college on 
many men; boys do not learn ^' men and 
things "; and, putting it on a business 
basis, that is what they go to school and 
college for, if we may insert three words, 
so as to make the phrase read, *' to work 
with men and things." School and college 
may be called the grammar of '' men and 
things." Now, to teach boys any subject, 
it is generally admitted that '' dealing di- 



178 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

rectly " with tlie subject in what is called 
the '' natural method " is the best way, if 
the teacher is a good teacher, and has the 
opportunity to give his undivided atten- 
tion to one or two boys at a time. In other 
words, principles and rules derived by the 
child himself from concrete experience 
stand him in better stead than the 
same principles and rules learned out 
of a book. Although this may be the best 
way to learn a subject, still this method 
may be employed to the complete extinc- 
tion of the faculty of the imagination and 
of faith, and so defeat one of the main 
objects of all true education. Moreover, 
such a thoroughly deductive method is not 
practical in classes. Grood teachers will 
always use this method as far as circum- 
stances allow, in verifying the grammars 
which represent the condensed learning of 
many generations put into convenient 
form for transmission. Even the best 
teachers with the most interested children 
would find their grammars to some 'degree 
indispensable. For teaching classes, there- 
fore, the grammar method must prevail; 
and yet the grammar must constantly be 
shown to be alive: that is, the true work 



THE CLASS 179 

of '' men and things," a sort of a handy 
compendium of work done and still doing; 
an introduction as well as an incentive to 
direct contact with the life itself. Looked 
at in this way, the school and the college 
are the places for learning the true princi- 
ples and rules of life as being worked out 
by *' men " in the great realm of 
** things." 

England is a fair example of what may 
be accomplished in the world by a nation 
whose method of education and whose 
method of government have been con- 
ducted throughout on an established order, 
constantly applied, to the everchanging 
circumstances of men and things, and, 
therefore, constantly tested and modified 
by facts. 



rs 

CLASSWOEK 

WHEN we descend from these broad 
applications to the teacher and his 
class, and we ask ourselves, What are 
the best studies to give the young and 
what are the. best ways of presenting these 
studies? we are getting to the point that 
must interest every teacher. No doubt, 
language is the study which prepares us 
best for knowing men. The way a man 
thinks is the thing we wish to know for 
ourselves and to teach the child, in order 
that he may think in the best possible way ; 
and language is the path of man's thinking. 
The English language, therefore, is the 
first and principal study of the child. The 
best method of teaching a child to think in 
the use of his own language will be partly 
determined by the conditions of his life, 
whether in his surroundings he hears cor- 
rect or incorrect English. The child learns 
to talk entirely by what we call the ' ' nat- 

180 



CLASSWORK 181 

Tiral method "; his wants will seek ex- 
pression, and he catches the expression 
largely through the power of mimicry 
and memory, with reason in almost 
total abeyance. The number of impres- 
sions that the child is storing up in its 
earlier years is not often appreciated by 
the elder. Memory is at its best, and then 
it is that memory should be wisely used to 
stock the mind with the most beautiful 
thoughts conveyed by the words of our na- 
tive tongue. As the reason dawns, the con- 
struction of the language may be gradually 
brought in. But grammar, as a study in 
itself, seems to me to be much more effec- 
tually taught in the Latin for those who 
are to study Latin. For mental drill, a 
so-called dead language is better than a 
modern language, chiefly because of its 
greater abundance and regularity of in- 
flections; and quite truly, also, because it 
is a dead language, and has no market 
value. A boy talking to his father about 
his studies in college, said, " I am going 
to drop Latin and take only those studies 
which will help me in law." His father 
replied : ' ' Then you had much better come 
to the office at once. I can teach you more 



182 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

law in a month than you will learn in a 
year at college. No, indeed ! you are not 
going to college for law, you are going 
for yourself ; to learn how to think, to 
learn how other men have thought, and to 
take a wider look at life for your own 
profit and happiness "; — good and sound 
advice, coming from a man who knew what 
he was talking about. Many men of that 
kind of sound sense in this land bring their 
boys to school, and say, '' Here I am, a 
slave to business; but I want my son to 
have an education and to be somebody 
when he grows up! " Let us be assured 
that the best men of the land, educated or 
uneducated, are with us in all our efforts 
to teach chii'^ren to think, not only as our 
fathers thought, but, if possible, to "go 
one better." 

We seem to have digressed from our 
consideration of the English class; yet 
let us hope that this digression bears dis- 
tinctly on the subject of teaching English 
in a class. Our language is so full of 
beautiful literature suitable for children 
that I should turn the English class largely 
into the practice of reading and other ex- 
ercises suggested by the reading, rather 



CLASSWORK 183 

than on the practice of grammar. To hear 
some of our college boys read and speak 
one would think that English was not their 
mother tongue. The carelessness in the 
use of their own language is but an index 
of their general carelessness in thought. 
Eight here, therefore, in speaking, writing, 
and reading English does the battle begin. 
The child having conquered the first diffi- 
culties of reading, let us choose carefully 
as the centre of our work in the class an 
interesting and well-written book, either 
one of the many readers suited to the ages 
of our pupils, or some standard book. If 
the latter, care should be taken to handle 
the book quite differently from the way in 
which we handle the ordinary school-book. 
It seems to me wiser never to put the 
standard authors which one wishes to lead 
the children to read and discover for them- 
selves, never to put such authors into 
school binding to be kept on the same shelf 
with other school books. It is hard enough 
to treat Virgil and Horace in that way. The 
child will take his cue from the master ; he 
does not easily forget the tender hand and 
friendly manner with which his teacher 
took his Scott or his Shakespeare into 



184 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

class, and neither will he forget the beauty 
of the unexpected passage as read by a 
true lover; it will act as a challenge for 
him to discover this author for himself. 
The higher flights of the mind are in se- 
cret, and spontaneous; the teacher's prov- 
ince is humbly to point the way, by going 
there himself alone, and decoying his little 
ones to explore for themselves these new 
and ever- widening fields. Let a whole- 
some dread be upon him of vulgarizing 
these fine sj^iritual things to the level of 
the grammar and the blackboard. In any 
case, such books to be used for a reading 
exercise should be put into the boy's hand 
only in the classroom, and not be carried 
to the schoolroom desk. 

" John, do you begin with Chapter I." 
Then let John have full swing till he has 
finished a certain portion. For purposes 
of correction, sometimes, the last sentence 
read again by the teacher reproducing tone 
of voice, colloquial pronunciation, and any 
other peculiarities or mistakes, will have 
a good effect in bringing home to a boy his 
inefficiency. Or, " Who noticed a mis- 
take? " Thus, one by one, hunting out the 
errors made in the passage, at the same 



CLASSWORK 185 

time testing tlie attention of each boy, this 
exercise is made the occasion of teaching 
care not only in reading the printed word, 
but also in the use of the voice and in 
intelligent expression. Let the teacher, 
from time to time, read aloud himself that 
he may set a standard of accurate and de- 
sirable reading to the class. One may see 
in such an exercise a wide field for teach- 
ing all manner of things, as well as for 
cultivating a proper taste in the choice of 
books. 

Say that this reading exercise has pro- 
ceeded for about half an hour; *' now close 
your books "; and then quickly examine 
the class on the spelling of any words 
which you may choose from the text, keep- 
ing some one at the board to write a list of 
the words misspelled; this list should be 
copied by each child in a special note-book, 
and learned as a spelling lesson for the 
next recitation. Such practice trains him 
to observe the spelling of words while he 
reads, just as the oral spelling lesson is 
important to train the ear and the enuncia- 
tion. Or else, ' ' Now we shall have fifteen 
minutes in which to write rapidly what 
you can remember of the reading." It is 



186 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

very important to train younger children 
at school in the art of putting down on 
paper rapidly what they have in their 
minds; and to this end I should always 
-have such writing done in the class under 
the master's eye, that he may keep them 
at work, and occasionally, by demonstra- 
tion on the board, show them how first to 
outline their subject and so arrange their 
paragraphs. Dictation exercises, gradu- 
ally leading in higher forms to practice in 
taking notes, all to be carefully reviewed 
out of class and presented at a following 
recitation, are the very best incentives to 
concentrated and rapid thought and to ac- 
curate expression. Nothing should be 
given for outside preparation that would 
offer an excuse for wasting time, or say- 
ing, ** I didn't know how." All first cop- 
ies of work should be corrected by the 
child himself, and then written in a book 
to be presented fresh and clear for the 
master's inspection. Too great stress can- 
not be laid upon the careful personal cor- 
rection of such second copies in the pres- 
ence of the boy himself, requiring him 
either to rewrite or to make good every 
error, adding all misspelled words to his 



CLASSWORK 187 

own list to be learned. From the earliest 
years such original work, based on read- 
ing in class, should be varied by calling 
occasionally for short compositions on all 
manner of subjects either set by the mas- 
ter or chosen by the boy. Whole hours 
should be given to the hearing of composi- 
tions read by their composers, from which 
sentences here and there should be chosen 
to be written on the board for analysis, if 
the class has begun Latin, or the study of 
any grammar. When a class enters the 
room, a sentence on the blackboard copied 
from an unknown composition, orthog- 
raphy and all, gives a man a great chance 
to rivet attention on certain kinds of 
errors, and forms an excellent exercise in 
analysis and reconstruction and general 
grammar work. Grammar note-books I 
have found helpful. Let me note here that 
the assigning of analysis of sentences, or 
of correcting sentences outside class, is a 
wretched practice, not only because chil- 
dren learn very little in that way of how 
to construct or write a sentence, but most 
of those whom one especially wishes to 
work will not do it for themselves, but 
simply get " pointers " from the brighter 



188 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

boys or kindly elders, who, from lack of 
time, answer their idle question in the 
most direct way. If there is no convenient 
work to assign for a preparation hour, 
give as a lesson a page of good prose or 
poetry to be copied; this is an excellent 
English exercise for the younger children. 
However, if a teacher realizes the necessity 
of stocking the child's mind with high 
thoughts and noble forms of expression, 
there will be a constant training in learn- 
ing and reciting memoriter from great 
authors in prose and poetry. 

Another exercise in the classroom which 
may be used in connection with the read- 
ing is to require different members of a 
class to give orally the substance of dif- 
ferent paragraphs, concluding each such 
effort with a kindly criticism. Great in- 
terest may be aroused by these oral efforts 
which may be branched off into discussions 
with all the rules of parliamentary order. 
As children get older, set debates with ap- 
pointed speakers make a delightful change, 
and give a teacher much chance for very 
helpful work. 

The English class in a school should be 
the one above all others looked forward to 



CLASSWORK 189 

with pleasure. Every hour's work may 
be so varied as to keep alive attention and 
interest. If a teacher realizes that what 
he is after for his pupils is to promote 
their power in thought and love of work by 
putting into them high thoughts and by 
teaching them the power to express these 
thoughts in fitting language, he will for- 
sake the grammar drill for reading, writ- 
ing, and speaking. I venture to say that all 
those who have attained success, and so 
joy in their use of the English language, 
would agree that they had not learned it 
from the English Grammar, but that they 
had learned it by absorbing the spirit and 
style. of great English writers and by pa- 
tient practice in the art of writing and 
speaking. The grammar, no doubt, is 
necessary, but it comes best through 
imitation and incidentally, as has been 
sketched above. The speech and pen of 
the average child trained on the English 
Grammar seems to me proof conclusive of 
its poverty in the true elements of mental 
training, as well as of its failure to teach 
English. It requires the more mature 
mind to grasp and to benefit by the science 
of Grammar. 



190 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

One is tempted to go beyond limit in 
discussing the English class with all its 
possibilities to promote fine thought and 
helpful work; these suggestions, how- 
ever, may be of use to younger teach- 
ers as lines on which to form their own 
methods. 

The history and geography classes also 
should be full of interest under a live 
teacher, and should act as adjuncts to the 
English class. By the aid of maps and 
wise notice of passing events, both of these 
studies can be made very stimulating to 
observation and thought, and afford ample 
incentive for expression. Boys should be 
encouraged to give vivid descriptions of 
places and events, both in writing and 
speaking. Here again short essays are 
in order, especially from those who have 
themselves seen places or events of inter- 
est, to be read before the whole class ; while 
a young artist should be utilized to draw 
map outlines on the board, in preparation 
for use in quizzing the class on names of 
places. The eye and the ear must both 
bear their due share of the work in receiv- 
ing impressions to memorize, as matter for 
the reason and the imagination. 



CLASSWORK 191 

Many cliildren miss a great part of the 
benefit to be derived from mathematics be- 
cause they begin wrong. They are not 
made to acquire thoroughly their tables, 
nor practised sufficiently in simple mental 
arithmetic. A boy, or more often a girl, 
will say, ** I can't do arithmetic "; but the 
teacher will soon find the difficulty to be a 
simple distaste for the work necessary to 
get things done accurately, bred largely 
through early neglect. I have had hun- 
dreds of children to teach mathematics, 
and I have yet to find one not able to do 
arithmetic, algebra, and geometry. Drill 
them well in mental arithmetic at every 
stage on all the different kinds of prob- 
lems reduced to the simple cases, and the 
power to solve the harder ones will come 
in due order under a teacher who will 
study each child and set himself to remedy 
his defects. 

'^ I do not understand that problem, 
sir. ' ' 

*' Have you read it over carefully! " 

*' Yes, sir." 

** Eead it again." 

Several mistakes will probably be made 
in the reading. Therefore, require the 



192 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

problem to be read again and again 
till the boy has corrected his own mis- 
takes. 

'' Now, what do you not understand 
about that problem? " 

^' I don't understand anything at all 
about it." 

<< Why, that is odd; it is very simple 
English. Eead the first sentence. . . . Do 
you understand that ? ' ' 

*' Yes,. sir." 

'' Then you do understand something; 
tell me in your own words what that sen- 
tence means. . . . Very good. Now read 
the next sentence. ... Do you understand 
what that means? . . . Yes! Now what are 
you asked to find in that problem? . . . 
Yes, that is right : what must you know in 
order to find that ? . . . Yes ! Do you know 
that, or does the problem tell you? . . . 
Yes, that is right ; so what do you do with 
this fact in order to obtain that? "... 
And so on, till you have convinced the boy 
either that he has the knowledge and the 
power to do the problem, or as to just 
where he is wanting. Other boys brought 
into the discussion, with certain estab- 
lished results put plainly on the board, 



CLASSWORK 193 

tend to make this Socratic method 
interesting and helpful to the whole 
class. 

The problem is the goal, and all pro- 
ficiency in figuring should constantly be 
brought to the test of usefulness in the 
solution of problems. When the funda- 
mental arithmetical problems in fractions 
have been mastered, it is easy to show how 
much more readily the same problems can 
be solved by using a letter, such as X, for 
the unit and then writing the problem in 
the form of an equation. A boy soon 
learns with proper leading how to express 
the relations of various quantities in this 
way, and, to my mind, there is no better 
mental training than this in order to ac- 
quire facility in dealing with the affairs 
of life. The power to see the true rela- 
tions of things, and to express those rela- 
tions, is true wisdom. The beginning and 
end of preparatory algebra is the equa- 
tion; and all the different processes should 
be taught simply as aids to solving equa- 
tions; and the equation should be taught 
simply as a means for solving problems. 
It always gives an added appetite to the 
boy for his work if he can be led to see 



194 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

its practical bearing on the business of 
manhood. 

*' I know it, but I can't say it " should 
never pass unnoticed. Insist on correct 
use of language in accurate definition and 
stating of principle. The English vocabu- 
lary is not to be curtailed simply because 
certain words are used inaccurately. We 
are so pressed to finish the tale of ex- 
amples necessary to produce for an exam- 
ination on which there are no principles 
called for and few, if any, problems that 
the teacher in mathematics is tempted to 
drive desperately on and to cut out all but 
the everlasting '^ tom-tom " of mere fig- 
ures only to find that in the end all his pa- 
tient labor is liable to go for nothing. Un- 
less a boy is taught to say plainly and cor- 
rectly what is in his mind, the chances 
are that what he has there will evaporate. 
To this end great care should be taken to 
train would-be mathematicians in the use 
of their own language. When called upon 
to give a demonstration, especially in 
geometry, a boy should never be inter- 
rupted by the teacher or by his fellows, 
so that he may have full swing to go his 
own way. Meanwhile, the whole class 



CLASSWORK 195 

should be kept on tlie watcli, and, while 
they give respectful and quiet attention, 
required to note mistakes to be corrected 
when the demonstration has been com- 
pleted. A teacher has his own powers, he 
has a text-book, he has a subject, and he 
has perhaps fifteen or twenty boys before 
him, each with different degrees and kinds 
of perception. He will therefore in mathe- 
matics, as in any other class, use all these 
different things in all possible combina- 
tions to keep his class awake and to reach 
each individual from all possible points of 
vantage. So much may be accomplished 
by a careful study of all these forces in 
order to play brightly and freshly new 
chords of harmony. A teacher in mathe- 
matics soon settles down to his oivn waif, 
if he is not careful, so that after his chil- 
dren get used to him, there is nothing new 
or bright in his class, a state of things 
much to be deplored for all concerned. 

Before the child comes to Latin, free- 
hand drawing seems to me to be one of 
the very best subjects for class-work. I 
have seen a practical man with a grasp 
of the object of the work keep a room full 
of one hundred young boys interested and 



196 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

busy for a half-liour daily. The class was 
divided into two or three divisions, and 
by means of models at different parts of 
the room, and a blackboard on which the 
master demonstrated how to go about the 
work, and on which also he set the exer- 
cises for the beginners, every boy had a 
chance to learn the rudiments of drawing 
and to go on also to work designed to give 
scope to special genius. This practical ap- 
plication by the hand of what is observed 
by the eye goes much further than the 
mere training of proficiency in handling a 
pencil; it is an excellent mental drill for 
all young children, and personally I am 
amazed that some schools have so far 
given in to the examination grind for col- 
lege as to omit drawing from their sched- 
ules. Edward Thring puts it down as 
among the necessary subjects of class- 
work. 

My own observation leads me not only 
to endorse this idea, but to go even still 
further and to bewail the general failure 
in most of our schools to have any regu- 
lar instruction in art. An artist who is 
an artist at heart and loves children, 
though he fail to produce marketable work 



CLASSWORK 197 

himself, would fill a place in our schools 
which we would soon come to consider in- 
dispensable to a general education. Un- 
told good would be accomplished for all 
that artistic class of children whose minds 
need such ^an outlet to wake them up to the 
ioy of work, besides the benefit to the 
whole school in having true standards in 
art constantly to the fore. 

Manual training also has the same im- 
portance in the application of hand to 
brain and eye, and it also serves as a mind- 
opener to some boys who have a special 
gift that way. These facts are becoming 
widely recognized by educators all over 
the land. The danger is that their educa-' 
tional value should be lost in the con- 
sideration of their value in the money 
market. 

Laboratory work for older boys who can 
really appreciate its value seems to be 
about the starting-point for one who is to 
look more to scientific than to classical 
training. But for the young it is worse 
than waste of time, for it becomes a mere 
idle satisfying of curiosity. Unless all 
this kind of laboratory work is producing 
food for thought and requiring careful 



198 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

study and hard mental work, it is plainly 
a mistake. 

Modern languages seem now to be hav- 
ing their day ; yet, in the first place, owing 
to their construction, and, in the second 
place, owing to their market value, they 
cannot stand with either Latin or Greek 
as subjects for a mental drill in class. Do 
not let fond mothers think that Jimmie 
will ever learn to speak fluently French 
or German in the ordinary school class. 
If it were possible under our present sys- 
tem, it would still be a waste of time. The 
picking up of the speech of a modern lan- 
guage requires very little but verbal imi- 
tation and memory, and does not provoke 
much thought and reason or give ground 
for hard class-work. The grammar as 
taught by reading, writing, and recitation, 
and the study of forms, should provide the 
main object of study. All that one can 
hope or even desire from the class study 
of French and German is a facility in cor- 
rect reading and translating. This ac- 
quired not only opens vast fields of litera- 
ture, but gives one the power to pick up 
more easily the speech if the occasion 
should arise. The class drill, however, is 



CLASSWORK 199 

the main thing, and this is brought about 
in the same way as drill in Latin or Greek. 

Let us note here that Greek, owing to 
its greater range of flexibility, seems at 
this age a little too much for the ordinary 
boy, a little too much of the same kind of 
thing that he gets to more advantage in 
Latin. I confess that, for my own part, the 
shades of distinction in meaning in the 
use of the Greek moods and particles were 
not always clear, not from want of study, 
but from want of power to see the delicate 
distinctions apparently clear to the Greek 
mind. But, for all that, I would not ex- 
change my drill in Greek grammar, and 
the vision of the Greek world through its 
poets and teachers, and the power to read 
the New Testament in the original, — I 
would not exchange these things for what 
I could have gotten at school from the 
German language and literature. Greek 
not learned at school is seldom, if ever, 
learned afterward, whereas a modern lan- 
guage may be fairly mastered, grammar 
and all, as the pastime of a year abroad, 
if there is the Latin training at the bottom. 

It is, however, ludicrous for a boy with 
little or no aptitude for language to at- 



200 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

tempt to get any useful knowledge or 
training from tliree or four languages all 
going on at once. It certainly is an ad- 
vance in education to be able to adapt the 
amount of language study to the evident 
capabilities of the boy. 

Now and then one presents himself at 
our schools who is apjjarently unable to 
get anything from the study of Latin. 
These cases, however, are very rare; if a 
boy can learn anything in the way of lan- 
guage, it is my experience that he can 
learn enough Latin to read the school 
classics ; and for such a boy the discipline 
of the task is undeniably beneficial. How 
he hates those endings ! Did it ever occur 
to you, my fellow-teacher, that the boy's 
salvation depended on the pronunciation 
of the last syllable? Not at a suggestion 
from you, but of his own accord, the full 
and perfect articulation of every syllable 
of a word to the very last. I confidently 
maintain that a boy taught to articulate 
his Latin words perfectly to the last syl- 
lable is in a fair way to attain to full 
perfection at his own last end. One of 
the main advantages, as we have noted be- 
fore, in using an unspoken language for 



CLASSWORK 201 

training purposes, consists in the number 
of its inflected forms ; these are especially 
noticeable in the final syllables. There- 
fore, the intelligent observation of all 
these changes requires an intelligent enun- 
ciation. This requires work. 

By all means, let there be real down- 
right work, things to be learned and re- 
membered; but let there be a careful se- 
lection of such things. To quote again 
from Thring's " Theory and Practice of 
Teaching " : ' ' There is a grand capacity 
in the youthful memory of accumulating 
with little effort mere sounds, without 
understanding. This prescribes that the 
most useful drudgery should be got 
through early. And it may fairly be said 
that if under present circumstances this 
was interpreted to mean that an absolutely 
infallible accuracy of declensions and con- 
jugations was acquired, years of after-toil 
would be saved, and in many instances life- 
long incapacity be turned into healthy 
activity of mind. No tongue can tell 
the hopeless state of muddle which is 
produced by scrambling into the word- 
quagmire without a single bit of solid 
knowledge to rest the sole of the foot on. 



202 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

Nature, therefore, in giving tlie young a 
youthful memory lays down its own laws, 
if any one would heed them. First, fill the 
great receptacle with everything that in- 
spirits and interests, all treasures of me- 
lodious verse, all thrilling narrative of 
daring deeds, all simple pathos of touch- 
ing endurance, mingled with the weird, 
wild truths of the wonders of the animal 
and physical world. And, secondly, all 
drudgery necessary to be known, which is 
not better learned in the practising it, 
word-forms, and everything belonging to 
word-forms and their meaning, may well 
be stored up at once. But rules and tech- 
nical terms should be avoided as much as 
possible. They pass for understanding 
without being understood; and not unfre- 
quently are the cause of all entanglements 
of after-years; when the stock names are 
answered to the stock questions ; and often- 
times neither teacher nor learner has the 
least idea of the real purport of the words 
they use so glibly. It is easy to learn 
books of rules, and never apply them. It 
is easy to answer them correctly and be 
quite ignorant why the answer is correct. 
Eules are the refuge of the brainless ; and 



CLASSWORK 203 

the instrument of those who have to pro- 
duce some show without the time or ma- 
chinery necessary for true work." 

Such remarks are a fitting introduction 
to the Latin class. Fortunately our mod- 
ern text-books for beginners in Latin are 
of the same mind, and, in a very skilful 
way, work in the forms to be memorized 
with their practical application. If the 
text-book does not supply a little reading 
lesson, I should manufacture one out of 
the simple forms at hand, in order to give 
zest to the mere drilling in forms and sen- 
tence construction. The more interesting 
such a little chapter might be, the better; 
some short forms putting into Latin the 
occurrences of the school, frequently used 
in a playful way, make the whole thing 
more human and enlist interest. As soon 
as reading has fairly begun, the composi- 
tion work should be on sentences formed 
from the reading lesson of the day. This 
may now be found in special text-books, 
though personally I prefer to give my own 
sentences. Such a practice enables a 
teacher to lighten up parts of the advance 
lesson, by giving the English, though with 
some change of tense or construction, to 



204 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

difficult passages in the text. In other 
words, he gives the English to be turned 
into Latin in such a way as not only to 
be an aid to the thinking boy in working 
out his translation, but in such a way as 
to promote thought and impress certain 
forms of construction on the mind. 

Let us sketch the work of a class in 
Latin or Greek. 

The well-aired, the well-lighted, and or- 
derly room, plenty of blackboard space, 
and a cheery teacher are all taken for 
granted. First, the review sentences in 
composition are rapidly recited, the mas- 
ter giving the English, and the boy the 
Latin or the Greek, as the case may be. 
These should have been so well learned 
as to require no prompting or hesitation, 
and to consume not more than three min- 
utes. That is something the boy must be 
made to do outside class : familiarity with 
the sound of properly constructed sen- 
tences is a necessity for first-rate work. 
In the second place, the advance sen- 
tences are called for, written on the 
board and corrected, while each boy 
follows on his own exercise and makes his 
own corrections. Here is one good chance 



CLASSWORK 205 

for grammar questions. These exercises, 
written in ink outside class, and corrected 
with pencil in class, should be handed in, 
looked over or not as the teacher has op- 
portunity, and returned in time to be 
copied in correct form in a book and 
learned before the next recitation. Of 
course, with beginners, this, with recita- 
tion of paradigms, constitutes the chief 
work of the hour, and the reading lesson 
is a sort of reward. But for those em- 
barked on Caesar's expeditions or more 
advanced reading, the whole composition 
exercise should be finished in ten minutes, 
and then the review reading lesson should 
be rapidly translated by one or two boys 
into fair English ; hesitation in this should 
not be tolerated; the perfection of the re- 
view is something to which every boy can 
approximate, and he ought to be made to 
do it. Two or three minutes in class is 
enough to hear the review properly read. 
Then follows the careful construing of the 
advance, the Latin order being maintained, 
so far as possible, both for convenience 
and for teaching a boy readiness in get- 
ting out his own translation. When the 
Latin order becomes natural to a boy, the 



206 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

terrors of translation have largely van- 
ished. Grammar questions in order to 
light up the text, or information elicited 
about allusions to passing events or myth- 
ical history, are all a necessary part of this 
drill on the advance; but the one point 
for the teacher is to press and teach the 
*' necessity " and the ** how " of plain, 
straight thinking on the part of every 
member of his class. Inattentive, sleepy 
boys will be roused by questions and board 
work; the best scholars will be given a 
chance to show their proficiency by sug- 
gesting better translations, and every 
boy's recitation should be closed by the 
master's reading of the passage in the best 
English at his command, while the mem- 
bers of the class should be encouraged to 
make notes of and to reproduce in the re- 
view these felicitous translations. While 
this oral translation is going on, the black- 
boards should be covered by written trans- 
lations, so that every hoy shall be kept as 
busy as possible. If there is time at the 
end of the lesson, comments should be 
called for on these written translations. 
No boy should escape his share of the 
hour's work; and the skill of the teacher is 



CLASSWORK 207 

shown in his power to awaken the ambi- 
tion of the dullest, while he gives play to 
the ambition of the brightest. One of the 
noticeable things in the class of a success- 
ful teacher is the way in which the quick 
and the slow are trained to help one an- 
other and to appreciate one another. The 
so-called stupid boy has always got 
something to give to the genius, and a 
class can be made to see that real abil- 
ity after all is the faculty of patient 
application. 

Perhaps the most notable advance made 
in teaching for the last twenty-five years 
has been in Greometry. The total abandon- 
ment of Euclid has been followed by a 
steady movement toward greater freedom 
in demanding more original work. The 
mere sketches of propositions, and the 
multiplicity of exercises, have stimulated 
thought and reason. Now it is impossi- 
ble for a boy to make too much use of his 
memory. The remark made by the pro- 
fessor to a high-stand man in my class at 
college after a perfect demonstration, 
could not be made in these days: *' Mr. 
A., you remind me of an old goat I saw 
in the campus this morning eating a copy 



208 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

of Euclid. Eeally, all of that must rest 
very heavily on your mind." 

Class-work, let us repeat, has two main 
objects in view: first, to prepare a child 
to work alone; and, second, to prepare a 
child to work in concert, that he may learn 
how to use his own powers without looking 
for a helping hand, and that he may learn 
to use those powers in connection with and 
in behalf of his fellows. 

To the lover of the young, no work will 
give greater satisfaction than class-work. 
Year by year we go back perhaps to the 
same old hackneyed subject, but still ever 
new, because the ever-changing boy, with 
all his possibilities for good and evil, for 
advance and for waste, is our subject ; and 
to handle a class so as to bring each boy 
to his best is a task large enough for any 
man. The failures but give sweetness to 
the successes, and the close contact with 
surging life keeps one's sensibilities alive 
and his heart young. '' Failures " and 
" successes "? What do we know about 
them? It is the " working with God " 
that brings to us some small share of His 
love and wisdom and breeds in us that 
faith which leaves results to Him. 



EXAMINATIONS 



B 



OYS! They are spoiling your 



girls.' 



We are growing old ; it is a sure sign of 
this sad fact when our memories persist- 
ently keep travelling back to the days of 
our youth. In this case, however, there is 
some excuse; for what man who ever sat 
as a boy before that sometimes grotesque 
and always lovable man, Dr. Hudson of 
Shakespeare fame, could forget either his 
words or his figure? " If I cannot make 
them laugh with me, I shall make them 
laugh at me," he would say in justification 
of his extravagancies in expression and 
gesture. And when he stopped amid a 
very fireworks of invective against exami- 
nations, and opened and shut his almost 
toothless cavern of a mouth in solemn 
mockery, and then delivered himself of the 
above remark, you may be sure that every 

209 



210 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

boy in tlie room was ready to endorse any- 
thing and everything that followed. A 
** dressing down " of the examination sys- 
tem is sure to find ready sympathy from 
the boy, and the little ruse to hold us was 
hardly necessary. " Our girls? " Yes, 
and ourselves, too. We were quite ready 
to cry '' good " to every hard word against 
the system. 

It is now thirty years ago since that 
evening in June when three hundred or 
more boys and men hung in rapt atten- 
tion while we listened to this talk on 
*' Eeading," and I venture to say that 
hardly one has forgotten the occasion and 
the substance of the remarks. His thesis 
was that education was growth, which, to 
be healthy, must be more or less spon- 
taneous. We grow most when we are en- 
joying ourselves most, when we are ab- 
sorbed in some game or book, carried along 
almost without exertion of will; hence the 
tremendous influence on mental growth 
and on the growth of character exerted by 
the books we read for pleasure. Recite 
growth? Examine growth? All exami- 
nations and recitations at once became al- 
most absurd in our eyes. The old gentle- 



EXAMINATIONS 211 

man then went on to show in a most mas- 
terful way, masterful enough for any au- 
dience, the false standards of education 
that were set up by the tendency to resort 
to frequent examinations. This was all, 
however, by the way, and was only to make 
clear to us the great importance in our 
lives of the things we chose to do of our 
own sweet wills. "Weeks of toil over our 
grammars and text-books seemed to leave 
us pretty much where we were at the be- 
ginning, while one hour with the book of 
our choice seemed to make us new and to 
open our eyes to a new world. 

While the drudgery and the work are nec- 
essary to give one the power of absorbing 
the life of the book, and necessary also to 
shape the tools by which the life may be 
used, yet how true this is, and what a 
danger for the teacher to fall into the pit 
of examinations and recitations ! It is no 
excuse for a man to say '' I must get my 
boys into college," and so put the blame 
on the University. It would be just as 
wise for a man in his own household to 
draw regularly on his capital for his din- 
ner with the excuse that he must have his 
dinner. Indeed it would be nearer the 



212 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

truth to say that the teacher who delib- 
erately made it his profession to prepare 
his children to pass examinations was liv- 
ing not on his own, but on somebody else's 
capital. The man that dwarfs the power 
of growth in his charges and weakens their 
own power of initiative, is more than an 
unwise teacher; he is robbing them to a 
degree of their capital, that germ of life 
which grows of itself, and that broad heri- 
tage of the world to which every man has 
his natural claim. Whereas his daily and 
hourly work is to teach them hoiv to grow, 
and to use to the best advantage what is 
already theirs by inheritance — this is edu- 
cation; the other is driving oxen to the 
fair grounds to be ranked by some fashion 
of the day. 

Let us put these two questions frankly 
to ourselves in the light of our own pro- 
fession. First, are we ready to assert that, 
even with all our modern breadth of cur- 
riculum, we have yet exactly hit the true 
measure of a man in fulfilment of the 
image in which he is made? We have 
but to look around us in the work-a-day 
world to see the failures of high-stand men 
and the successes of duffers, and to force 



EXAMINATIONS 213 

from every fair-minded teacher an em- 
phatic '' No." By failures, we mean men 
who do not fit in to make the world a 
better place to live in. The discrepancy in 
the ranks between those of the examina- 
tions of the schools and those of later life 
are not all due to premature develop- 
ment. But such discrepancy emphatically 
means that the examinations of the schools 
are not true measures of the youth or of 
their growth. It happened that but a few 
hours before penning these words the 
writer was occupied in marking a set of 
examination papers: A was marked one 
hundred, not a mistake or a slip in a fairly 
hard paper on percentage and interest. 
B received forty-five. Now A stands be- 
fore me, with small head and eyes and low 
forehead, perfectly delighted at his suc- 
cess; B, with a twinkle of amusement in 
his large blue eyes, with a beautiful clear 
skin and splendid head with high forehead, 
shrugs his shoulders and supposes that he 
had " got everything all mixed up." He 
comes nearer the truth than he knows : im- 
pressions have come to his high-strung 
soul so fast that there seems to be no room 
for this tiresome profit and loss: he is 



214 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

all ' ' mixed up ' ' because he is so full of a 
great diversity: notMng as yet has begun 
to take definite shape : the world and him- 
self in it are great and amusing puzzles. 
Then comes the driver with his grammar 
or his rule of percentage, and in his fever- 
ish desire to get the boy ready for an ex- 
amination, spoils the whole of his beautiful 
kaleidoscope by trying to turn it at once 
into a microscope, or, better still, into a 
telescope where the child stands at the big 
end while the small end is completely filled 
by his master and his percentage, — they 
look so small and so far away. As I gaze 
into the eyes of that high-souled cliild, with 
the simple sight that is mine by nature, I 
feel humbled at my bungling methods, and 
wonder how I could have dared to talk to 
him at all about examination marks and 
percentages. 

And, moreover, owing to the limited 
area covered by a written examination, 
and to the elimination of the personal fac- 
tor, only certain limited amounts of tech- 
nical knowledge can be displayed, and no 
real estimate of the Jiow of a child's at- 
tainment can be reached; and the hoiv, 
after all, is the main thing in the process 



EXAMINATIONS 215 

of education. The acquirement of habits 
of independent thought, of application, of 
insight, and of expression are vastly more 
important than the mere readiness to an- 
swer questions put by another. 

The second question suggested is this : — 
Does not the frequent examination with its 
passing mark of fifty or sixty tend quietly 
to produce a false standard of work as well 
as a false estimate of work? The writer 
remembers a time when the only accepted 
standard in his school was, " Are you do- 
ing your best? " Examinations came but 
once or twice a year, and the marks were 
so lost sight of in the general standing that 
there seldom was any question of a pass- 
ing mark. The school was full of customs 
and traditions that exalted 'the scholar as 
well as of traditions against squeezing out 
the failures. '' The best you can do " was 
ever on the lips of our leader both in pri- 
vate and public, with great patience for 
those who were slow in going on ^' from 
strength to strength." As I now look back 
upon it, growth was the aim and object 
of it all. '' What is to be gained by drop- 
ping John? You say that he knows his 
work as well as he is likely to, but that 



216 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

he is so inaccurate that lie cannot get 
tlirougli the examination. Accuracy will 
not come through repetition of work 
known well enough to be stale, but rather 
through new work more likely to arouse 
the interest : you must be patient and love 
him and try and get him to be more accu- 
rate. Let him work a little in your study ; 
your mere presence will give him encour- 
agement and help him to keep his attention 
fixed." We have heard something like 
this from men who have proved themselves 
great educators. 

Further, let it be said, the best work 
is not done under a rod of any kind, 
whether it be a birch or the fear of 
failure in an examination. '' Oh, that I 
had been made to work ! " is the righteous 
complaint of the man who has been al- 
lowed to idle away his youth. Yet, in the 
process of making there is always the 
danger of marring. What makes one, 
mars another. Make him study? Yes. 
But this can be generally avoided and al- 
ways included by making him want to 
study. 

Thring has some spicy words on the use 
and abuse of examination which he sums 



EXAMINATIONS 217 

up thus : ' ' Examinations are very efficient 
for judging neglect or idleness; are also 
efficient in a very few well-defined in- 
stances in determining a certain kind of 
merit, but they break down utterly from 
many reasons over a wider field. They are 
also most fascinating exercises of power to 
those who believe in them. If memory, 
rules, and neatly packed knowledge make 
men, up with the flag, enlist our workers 
under the banner of Examinations. 

'* But if education and training are the 
true aim of mankind, and power in man's 
self the prize of life, then no superstition 
ever ate into a healthy national organism 
more fatal than the cult of the Examiner. 
Better in its degree the negro bowing down 
before the ghastliest fetich, than the civil- 
ized Mumbo-jumboism which thinks it can 
award over a whole kingdom the palm of 
mind. Examinations in that case are but 
another name for death to originality, and 
all improvement that is original." 

Let us repeat : the problem is to win the 
boy, and in such a way as not to spoil the 
ideals or the spontaneous efforts of others 
already won. The levelling up of the 
*' duffer " is no excuse for the levelling 



218 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

down of the " scholar." The cutting off 
of the liberty of a teacher filled with love 
for his subject and his children in order 
to bring all his scholars under the hammer, 
is a grave mistake. For forming scholar- 
ship, for educating children, no system, 
however perfect, can take the place of the 
teacher, and every system should tend not 
to lighten the responsibility, but to give 
further weight to the responsibility of 
^ every teacher for every child. 

On the other hand, examinations have 
a legitimate place in the process of educa- 
tion, if it is understood that they are 
rather one of the steps in education than 
a measure of growth. Colleges must have 
entrance examinations; and schools must 
have examinations; both as definite tasks 
to be accomplished and as aids to teachers 
in determining the ability of children to 
go on to advanced courses. It is an im- 
portant thing for a child to learn to have 
some tangible results of its work at its 
fingers' end, and so well tabulated as to 
pass an examination on whatever can be 
embraced in a paper. Also it is a great 
matter for a child to learn to do its best 
under trial. Though it is true that some of 



EXAMINATIONS 219 

the finest scholars have confessed to a 
panic even at the sight of an examination 
paper, and though we must admit that 
such panic arises often from the extreme 
sensitiveness and shrinking modesty of 
such high-strung natures, still, in the main, 
it is a weakness to be overcome. The 
power to do one's best at an examination 
is a good thing in itself, and a thing to be 
cultivated in the process of education. 

This, then, seems to be the place of the 
examination in the school: not so much 
a measure of advance in education, but as 
part of the whole mental training, and to 
be used by the teacher not as the final ap- 
peal of efficiency, but only as an important 
factor in that appeal. 

To this end the custom of averaging an 
examination mark with the daily marks is 
a good thing. In marking papers, every 
teacher has experienced the difficulty of 
doing justly. Certain classes of mistakes 
are a particular bugbear to certain men, 
and it is quite possible that their mark- 
ing of a paper would be so hard on a par- 
ticular boy or class of boys as to defeat 
the whole end of the examination and to 
discourage excellent hard-working boys. 



220 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

Again, every man who has had experience 
in this unpleasant duty knows how varia- 
ble his own marks will be for the same mis- 
take in different papers or at different 
periods of his own digestion. It is truly 
laughable to hear a body of masters in a 
school laying down the law about accuracy, 
and sagely talking about the results to fall 
upon the head of the luckless chap who has 
received fifty-nine for an examination, and 
the congratulations due to another who 
has received sixty. One is sometimes re- 
minded of the fact that even Eoman civili- 
zation had arrived at the point where two 
examiners could not meet without laughter. 
Perhaps we take ourselves and our work 
more seriously, — I hope we do; but still 
it is my experience that careful review of 
any set of marks for an examination re- 
veals a number of inconsistencies and in- 
accuracies that for a lajTuan would vitiate 
the whole result. It is perfectly evident to 
this plain lajTuan that if justice is to be 
done to those boys who find examinations 
difficult, their papers should go through 
the hands of several men. If the system is 
used at all as an aid in determining the 
proficiency of a scholar on any piece of 



EXAMINATIONS 221 

work, it ought to have a fair and just 
application. After having carefully re- 
viewed the papers and marking of a cer- 
tain form, I sent four of the papers to four 
different men in different parts of the 
Eastern States, all men of long experience 
in marking examination papers, and in 
every case the marks assigned were much 
higher than those given by men of less ex- 
perience in that particular science of 
marking. The layman's rating of a paper 
is more likely to approach that of the sci- 
entific marker than that of the teacher who 
always has his pet mistakes to watch for 
and does not easily throw off his role as 
teacher in favor of that as examiner. 

A professional man, a teacher who can- 
not get out of his rut and stand with the 
layman on the roadside for a look, is not 
only liable to lose some of his load, but to 
get tired himself, and to be run over by the 
march of live men and women who are now 
thronging our tracks. Every one of us 
must be able to get a fair look at the child 
himself, and absolutely refuse to measure 
him by any standard which we do not ap- 
ply to ourselves, or his work by any stand- 
ard but that of absolute justice. No child 



222 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

ought to be dropped from a class or made 
to go over old work unless by a consensus 
of the opinions of all his teachers. And it 
does seem as if the Universities might al- 
ways give due weight to such an opinion 
when delivered in writing along with a 
boy's examinations for entrance. The per- 
sistent consideration of the individual is 
always hard, the hardest part of the 
teacher's work, especially when brought 
into connection with the written results of 
an examination; and yet such considera- 
tion must always stand as one of the dis- 
tinctive marks of a good school and of a 
good teacher. 

In pursuance of this idea, in connection 
with the subject of examinations, the old- 
fashioned '' orals " were not lightly to be 
esteemed. One such examination in the 
middle of the winter term is of unique 
advantage in many ways, not the least of 
which is the examination of the teacher 
and his methods by trustees, visiting 
alumni, and brother teachers. A well- 
planned oral examination, where every 
boy has a chance to write as well as to" 
recite, is not only suggestive of the general 
results of a teacher's work for a class in 



EXAMINATIONS 223 

manners and mind, but it is also an occa- 
sion where every boy is brought in bis per- 
sonality face to face with a body of inter- 
ested lay elders. These occasions, in my 
own experience, used to furnish the very 
thing that was necessary to enable a just 
measure to be dealt to the individual 
through the results of written examina- 
tions. Moreover, the benefit to the school 
at large accruing by the visitation of so 
many ^'reverend and grave seniors " was 
greatly enhanced by the chance that we all 
had to hear good and sometimes great 
speakers. This style of examination, how- 
ever, does not appeal to the business meth- 
ods of the day; it is thought too cumber- 
some, too much trouble for the results im- 
mediately tangible. 

Let it be written in letters of fire — 
sooner or later it will be burned into the 
teacher's heart — that in our profession 
there are no short-cuts, except the cutting 
of red tape. Life is trained, educated, led 
out, only by the spending of life; edu- 
cation proceeds in direct and compound 
proportion as the life of the teacher is 
worth giving and as he gives it through 
toil and devotion. 



2M PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

A great educator, one of whose texts 
was, '^ Examine yourself,"- wrote to his 
pupils, '' Yea, gladly will I spend and be 
spent for you, though the more I love you, 
the less I be loved." 



XI 

RELIGION IN THE SCHOOL 

TO put it concisely, religion in the 
school begins and ends with religion 
in the teacher ; begins with the teacher, be- 
cause no child can get a true conception of 
religion if his elders show him a false one ; 
and ends with the teacher, because no 
amount of technically correct teaching or 
worship in the school can have a healthy 
effect on the child if it does not manifestly 
go to mould the heart and will of the 
teacher. This, after all, is but circumlocu- 
tion for the plain statement that religious 
men and women in a school are more im- 
portant than religious forms and cere- 
monies. 

The whole question seems to turn on 
the teacher's attitude toward the child and 
toward his profession. If we ourselves do 
not believe in the sacredness of our call- 
ing, and, as the way opens, are not ready 

225 



226 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

to give our whole life to it, we have made 
a grave mistake. We have no right to 
experiment with the roots of the lives of 
our fellows. To play with stocks and 
bonds, to scratch the soil, to buy and sell, 
may not work serious harm to our fellow- 
men, that is, harm which does not tend to 
right itself ; but to teach for hire or merely 
for amusement is really a dreadful and 
insidious crime. The criminal may go on 
his way undetected, but the generation to 
come is sure to reap from these seeds of 
selfishness a harvest of all sorts of poi- 
soned weeds. 

Eeligion in school, therefore, begins with 
religion in the teacher. And the real test 
of religion in the teacher is his attitude 
toward the child. 

What is the attitude that the Christian 
teacher should assume toward every child? 
We have suggested the answer to that 
question in former papers ; suffice it, there- 
fore, to say here briefly, *' that attitude 
from which the teacher sees in the child 
the desire for perfection and which con- 
strains the teacher to continual effort to 
bring that desire to a measure of fulfil- 
ment." Let us add, in this paper on reli- 



EELIGION IN THE SCHOOL 227 

gion, '* that attitude from which the 
teacher sees the child as the child of 
God. ' ' Such an attitude on the part of its 
teachers will make any school a kind of re- 
ligious school and one from which no child 
could go away unimproved. The begin- 
nings of all conversions to God grow in 
such an atmosphere. Yet if they are to go 
on to perfection, if the child's will is to be 
finally won, in spite of failure, to rest in 
the strength and love of God, there must be 
some definite objective picture firmly fixed 
in mind and heart. Sad experience has 
taught us that even the contemplation of 
the life of a good and holy mother without 
definite teaching and training in methods 
of thought and action is utterly futile to 
make a religious man out of a simply nat- 
urally good boy. Of course we mean by 
a religious man one who is trying to do 
the will of God in the world and sustained 
by his faith in God. 

Nature may go a long way on the reli- 
gious road if there are always in sight 
those who have filled their nature with 
something additional. If history has 
proved anything, it has proved over and 
over again that unassisted nature cannot 



228 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

find God, but, on the contrary, tends to 
degenerate and get farther from Him. 
There are, it is true, a longing for God 
and a predisposition to accept reasonable 
proofs of His existence and of His power 
to lift man higher. But every great 
movement in religion has arisen from 
what we call a revelation. 

In such an article as this we are not at- 
tempting to do more than deal with this 
vital subject in a way to produce some 
practical results for the teacher. It is 
merely, therefore, from the standpoint of 
a teacher that we remark that those who 
deny such a revelation as a necessity in 
religion and consider that what we call 
the ' ' natural man ' ' is sufficient in himself 
to evolve all the religion that he needs, 
that such philosophers either are giving 
meanings to the words " objective " and 
*' revelation " which are too refined for the 
average mind, or that they do not make 
sufficient account of the fact that they 
themselves are the direct outcome, men- 
tally and spiritually, of long ages of what 
we shall call objective teaching and the 
belief in a revelation. 

It seems to me that Newman's argu- 



RELIGION IN THE SCHOOL 229 

ments on revealed and natural religion are 
peculiarly convincing to those of us wlio 
have spent our lives trying to teach, and 
that they enforce with unerring clearness 
the necessity for teaching revelation as an 
objective fact to be grasped by the intel- 
lect. How simple and how true is the fol- 
lowing from the Apologia! In speaking 
of the Church, he writes: '' She has it in 
charge to rescue human nature from its 
misery, but not simply by restoring it to 
its own level, but by lifting it up to a 
higher level than its own. . . . Such truths 
as these she vigorously reiterates and per- 
tinaciously inflicts upon mankind; as to 
such she observes no half-measures, no 
economical reserve, no delicacy or pru- 
dence ; ' ye must be bom again, ' is the 
simple, direct form of words which she 
uses after her Divine Master ; ' your whole 
nature must be reborn; your passions 
and your affections and your aims and 
your conscience and your will must all be 
bathed in a new element and reconsecrated 
to your Master, and, the last not the least, 
your intellect.' " 

In another place he says : ' ' Christianity 
is simply an addition to nature ; it does not 



230 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

supersede or contradict it; it recognizes 
and depends on it, and that of necessity; 
for how possibly can it prove its claims ex- 
cept by an appeal to what men already 
have? " 

Therefore, in the school let there be, 
first, that which is natural; then, that 
which is spiritual. 

First, that which is natural. As there 
can be no true religion in a school where 
its teachers are not religious men and 
women, so let it be thoroughly understood 
that there can be no true religion where 
the daily life of the place is not so ordered 
as to teach truth, good fellowship, and re- 
spect for authority. These fundamentals, 
wrought happily into the life of the whole 
family, are easy to teach and easier to neg- 
lect in a great company of boys: easy to 
teach, for the chances for their display are 
lurking in every feature of the life of such 
a community; and easier to neglect, for 
the strain of maintaining high standards 
among the young, who are ever ready and 
persistent in going the shortest and easiest 
way, is a great weariness to the teacher, 
and presents a strong temptation to be 
satisfied with mediocre results and greater 



RELIGION IN THE SCHOOL 231 

peace. Thus far day schools and boarding 
schools stand on common ground. And 
there is one other factor in this common 
religious ground, in which the high schools 
are far ahead of anything yet developed 
in the boarding school: that is, the im- 
portant factor of fellowship; not the ex- 
clusive fellowship which is too apt to grow 
up among boys in our expensive boarding 
schools, but a fellowship which ought to 
be the heritage of every boy and girl in 
this great democracy, a fellowship for all 
sorts and conditions of men. No phase of 
modern education can be more unhappy 
for the individual or more dangerous for 
the Eepublic than that which produces the 
kind of snob that is sometimes said to be 
the product of our boarding schools. What 
shall we do to make the boy of wealth and 
refinement know his place in God's world? 
Missionary work, whether in summer 
camps or settlements, only makes matters 
worse, unless there is the very wisest guid- 
ance. Patronage toward the less fortu- 
nate is worse than neglect. 

From one end of the school to the other 
let the influence of some strong man be felt 
who loves all men as his brothers, and who 



232 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

in season and out, by word and example, is 
educating his children to live lives of 
service. The careful teaching of religious 
truth as found in the life of Jesus Christ 
goes a long way to solving this as well as 
other difficulties. 

Therefore, in schools which are to sup- 
ply not only the '' field " which we have 
spoken of in our paper on ' ' The School, ' ' 
but also the '' home," there is manifestly 
a further duty, that which is spiritual. 
These principles of natural religion can- 
not be called Christian till we bring in 
the Person; till we bring home to the 
child's heart its responsibility to this Per- 
son. Eight here begins the distinctive 
work of the Christian school. Somehow 
or other, the laws of the school are to be 
so administered as to commend themselves 
to the children as being in accord with the 
laws of God. To do this, the Law of Love 
must be written beneath and above and 
around and all through the law of the 
school. And this law can be traced only 
by the human hand. The Person of God 
can be made true and winning to men and 
children only through the person of man. 
It is not to bring God down to the common 



RELIGION IN THE SCHOOL 233 

life, but to bring the common life up to God 
in such a way as to win each child to the 
realization of its birthright into God's 
life. 

This takes indeed a magical hand in the 
school, but a hand which any humble- 
minded man may claim as his, whose own 
right hand holds God's, and whose left 
holds the child's. 

Let us consider how such a person goes 
about his work of making the Person of 
God attractive to the child. Though his 
children know intuitively that God is in 
all his thoughts, they never hear him 
preach in the schoolroom. There he never 
mentions God or Heaven; his words are 
his own to his own children. His words 
of appeal are to the hearts and con- 
sciences as he knows them before him, and 
they ring true from his own heart. The 
wisdom of the serpent and the harmless- 
ness of the dove call out every device to 
awaken the better side of the nature to 
reason and to common-sense, illustrating 
from the daily life of work, play, and 
prayer. He is his children's friend, and 
believes in them and they in him. This is 
his opportunity to draw out all that is 



234 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

best in nature and wliet the intellect and 
the heart for something higher. 

Therefore, when this man stands in his 
pnlpit in the House of God, he never 
shocks the natural reverence of the child 
by straight references to schoolroom or 
playground. There the Life of God is set 
forth in all Its majesty of saving power 
and justice and mercy, in such a way as to 
throw Its light on all around and into 
every crevice of^the heart, in such a way as 
to lead each one to know God and to know 
himself in all his relations to God and his 
fellow-men. Parables of their own lives at 
work or play, stories with hidden mean- 
ings, parables of the lives of rich and poor 
in the great world beyond, parables of the 
purely spiritual life to come are as plenti- 
ful as from the Great Teacher himself, but 
never the pointing of the finger too plainly 
at this or that sore of which all are 
ashamed; they are only antagonized and 
shocked or even amused by the refer- 
ence. ** He that hath ears to hear, let 
him hear." Why shock his ears to arouse 
the wilfully deaf? The Gospel loses both 
charm and power when the preacher be- 
comes a scold. It is not only our colored 



EELIGION IN THE SCHOOL 235 

brethren tliat sneak out wlien the hen roost 
is mentioned, nor only the boy that laughs 
in his sleeve when his ' ' cribs ' ' are raked 
over. 

Is it not a plain inference that the ser- 
mon is an intrinsic part of the service of 
worship and so should always be primarily 
an instruction based on the Scripture read 
at such a service? If this were more ap- 
preciated by all preachers, there would 
grow the habit of attention to the Scrip- 
ture, and also our boys and girls and men 
and women would be better instructed 
Christians. Young people are easily 
* ' worked up, ' ' but just as easily react, and 
soon cease to be moved by either oratory 
or appeals to the feelings. Whereas a 
good instruction quietly given, even if it 
is not wholly understood, does no harm, 
and if threaded with heart and good sense 
and even a shade of humor, is sure to win 
more and more attention and to train the 
child to expect something worth while and 
so to sit with the hearing ear. 

But we must be sure, if possible, that 
our children are getting hold of something 
definite. Therefore, there must be the 
class instruction with occasion for ques- 



236 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

tion and answer, as well as for examina- 
tion. Now as to this instruction, as in 
every other, there will be the diversity of 
method, ranging all the way from the 
purely natural to the purely dogmatic. 
The Unitarian proposes simply to open 
the child's mind and heart to experience 
God in his own character. With the ob- 
jective teaching of the character of Jesus 
Christ, transmitted to him by the beautiful 
lives of his teachers, there is no doubt that 
the individual Unitarian has attained to a 
great degree of godliness. It is not worth 
while here to discuss the evident limita- 
tions of such a character any more than it 
is worth while to discuss the evident limi- 
tations of certain phases of the charac- 
ter of the Catholic. What we are after 
is to find a way of teaching religion to 
children that is practical for all kinds 
of children, giving great scope to strong 
individualities and at the same time giving 
all the leading that human nature at large 
will always crave. There is also in this 
question the same element that we discover 
in all mental training : namely, the element 
of faith as a path or method of thought; 
whether more practical results are ob- 



RELIGION IN THE SCHOOL 237 

tained by training the child to accept with- 
out question the results of another's expe- 
rience and then to put these accepted facts 
to a practical test in his own experience, 
adding and subtracting therefrom and giv- 
ing new interpretations as occasion arises, 
or rather by training the child to accept 
nothing beyond what it verifies itself. In 
teaching a language or a science, all agree 
that the object is to know the language or 
the science, and as far as methods go, the 
grammar seems to be the practical method 
or path by which the every-day child is 
personally conducted to this knowledge. 
We are training our children to think first 
on lines laid down by others, as a stimulant 
and a safe guide to their own thoughts. 
Why not the same dogmatic method in reli- 
gion! There can be no real reason except 
the one boldly asserted by some teachers : 
namely, that there is no such thing as a 
science of religion. Nothing of impor- 
tance, they say, has been revealed to men 
or discovered by men that is not revealed 
to every man or discoverable by every 
man. Or, to state it in another way, all 
agree that the object is to know God, but 
there is a sharp disagreement on the pos- 



238 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

sibility of acquiring any part of this 
knowledge as a simple mental acquire- 
ment. There is nothing to be acquired, 
some say, but a certain subjective experi- 
ence which will take care of itself and find 
its own mental fodder. 

I respectfully submit that as a method 
for training children in religion this has 
been a dismal failure. The only thing that 
has saved the day at all has been the old 
spirit of Orthodoxy that has stalked like 
an avenging ghost of Catholicity through 
the Protestant world. No! Let us be 
frank. We do believe that there is a 
science of Theology in the same sense of 
the word ' ' Science ' ' as when we speak of 
Natural Science. We do believe, more- 
over, that God has revealed Himself to 
man in many ways, but most directly in 
the Person of Jesus Christ; and we do, 
therefore, set before us the task of teach- 
ing our children to know God and Jesus 
Christ whom He has sent, — to know God 
with all the fulness of knowledge that we 
mean by the Master's phrase,** with all thy 
heart, with all thy soul, and with all thy 
mind." And the question is not, how are 
we to train those few chosen souls who 



RELIGION IN THE SCHOOL 239 

from birtli and early association have had 
their ears opened to this revelation and 
take its precepts as naturally as the born 
musician takes music; but the question is, 
how are we to train that vast number 
of young people who take it as a hardship 
to learn anything that requires effort ; and 
while we are doing this, not to deaden the 
keen ear of the religious genius? 

In the first place, let us dismiss from 
our minds the fallacy that anything up- 
lifting can be learned without work on the 
part of the child. And while the teacher 
is dismissing this fallacy, let him not fall 
into the other of considering that work is 
helpful simply in the ratio of its difficulty 
and distastefulness. In the study of theol- 
ogy more than in that of any other study, 
the aim of the teacher is to make hard 
work a thing to be desired, for the range 
of theology always embraces the heart and 
soul as well as the mind. 

As to the method, we have nothing new 
to offer. It seems to me that the Master's 
method was clear and sufficient: first and 
always, an appeal to authority; second, 
*' the works that I do," and, third, an ap- 
peal to the result in man himself of accept- 



240 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

ing Him. Never was the Person to be lost. 
Such a method seems to pervade all the 
teaching of Jesus. He Himself sums it up 
in the words of St. John v:19, 20, 21:— 
** Verily, verily, I say unto you, the Son 
can do nothing of himself, but what he 
seeth the Father do: for whatsoever he 
doeth, these also doeth the son likewise. 
For the Father loveth the Son, and sheweth 
him all things that himself doeth: and he 
will shew greater works than these, that ye 
may marvel. For as the Father raiseth 
up the dead and quickeneth them; even so 
the Son quickeneth whom he will." The 
Father, the Son, and the quickening Spirit 
among men; Authority, Personified in 
Jesus, quickening the life of men. St. Paul 
but began to demonstrate the possibilities 
of such a method which has ever since pre- 
vailed wherever Christ has been truly and 
fully taught. As he states distinctly in the 
fifteenth chapter of the First Epistle to the 
Corinthians : ' ' I declare unto you the 
gospel which I preached unto you, which 
also ye have received, and wherein ye 
stand. . . . For I delivered unto you first 
of all that which I also received, how that 
Christ died for our sins according to the 



EELIGION IN THE SCHOOL 241 

scriptures: and that he was buried, and 
that he rose again the third day according 
to the scriptures : and that he was seen of 
Cephas," and so on through a whole list 
of persons, credible witnesses still alive; 
" and last of all he was seen of me also 
as of one born out of due time; " — ^' last 
of all; " — yet his own spiritual vision of 
the risen Christ ranked in the same cate- 
gory with those of the others who saw Him 
in the flesh with their natural eyes. And 
then follows that strong appeal to the 
result of his preaching upon their own 
lives. 

" If Christ be not risen, then is our 
preaching vain, and your faith is also vain, 
. . . ye are yet in your sins," — ra straight 
and bold appeal, but one that must ever 
go along as part of the trinity of witness 
to our faith in God. So we have to face 
our children, first, with authority to de- 
liver what has been delivered to us; sec- 
ond, with our own personal witness to the 
verity of what we teach plainly evident 
in our lives ; and, third, with the wise and 
convincing appeal to their own experience. 
Let us not be misunderstood to teach that 
true faith arises by the accumulation of a 



242 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

multitude of particulars in experience ; not 
at all ; it rather grows from a root of vital 
intercourse, such as we have tried to out- 
line. All this seems undeniable, though 
the history of Christian teaching has 
shown wide divergence in its application. 
Yet I venture to say that no good and last- 
ing results have ever been attained where 
the balance of this trinity of witnesses has 
been neglectd. 

The question for us is, therefore, how 
best can we maintain this balance in teach- 
ing theology to the child ? We surely have 
something to hand down; not merely the 
sacred writings with their wide applica- 
tion to all life, not merely that application 
made in the Person of Jesus Christ, as 
worked out from a study of His historical 
life, but also the application of all God's 
Word as personified in Jesus and as lived 
by men in the world from the days of St. 
Paul to this day, " Jesus risen from the 
dead and alive for evermore," alive now in 
the hearts of believers. We have a priceless 
heritage slowly and painfully accumulated 
during all these centuries, consisting not 
only of the visions of those few hundred 
men in Palestine, but now also of many 



RELIGION IN THE SCHOOL MS 

millions, handed down to ns in words of 
prayer and praise and action. This life, 
this quickening power of the Spirit among 
men, has from time to time taken shape not 
only in the lives of Saints so suitable for 
children to read, but it has flowed, as it 
were, into forms of speech and action. 
These forms, like our Book of Common 
Prayer, have been handed from one gen- 
eration to another as sacred vessels to be 
kept full and ever garnished into new 
beauty. 

When I give the Book of Common 
Prayer into the hands of my child without 
teaching him how to use it, I might as 
well give a lump of gold without teaching 
him how to use that. 

How shall I begin this teaching? The 
book itself gives me the clue, in what is 
called the Catechism. Now the Catechism 
is nothing but simple dogma, the simplest 
and most concise form of the collected 
truths of the ages, put into shape to hand 
on from one child generation to another. 
As we all know, the child has little power 
of reason or of the philosophical faculty 
necessary to evolve or fix in mind princi- 
ples worked out from the Life of our Lord 



244 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

or from the lives of history. We do not 
give as a lesson to be learned by the child 
the account of its father's or mother's life, 
or even of that of some great ancestor. 
They learn the results of these lives by 
living with them or with what they have 
produced. We say to the child '' Thou 
shalt " or " Thou shalt not " on our own 
authority, thus training the conscience and 
habits of thought and action by simple 
dogma ; and then, as the reason and under- 
standing expand, we win both and set high 
ideals by stories of great men and pri- 
marily of the Saviour of men. Is not this 
the accredited method all through all 
branches of education? First, to make all 
possible use of the memory and the plia- 
bility of youth, and gradually, more and 
more, to bring in the training of the rea- 
son and the constructive faculty. In their 
religious instruction, the Apostles were 
eminently dogmatic. And with all our 
advance, human nature seems to require 
and expect the same general leading from 
those who know. 

The Catechism is indeed wonderful in 
its simplicity, in its breadth, in its direct- 
ness, and in its adaptability to the young, 



RELIGION IN THE SCHOOL 245 

as an introduction to the fuller teaching 
of the Prayer Book. Let it stand verbatim 
in the memory as a background and guide 
to all that is to come. Scripture story, 
hymns, and parables from nature provide 
endless illustration. But the Saviour's 
life set as a lesson tends to vulgarize what 
should ever be treated with the greatest 
reverence. This Life is the natural light 
along the road. The road without it is 
dreary indeed, as the light without the 
road serves but to dazzle the sight and 
block advance. 

Let uS then have a plain and distinct 
line of teaching from the beginning, to 
serve not as a wall to circumscribe thought 
and action, but as a path to lead straight 
on into that paradise of God's love where 
each must explore treasures for himself. 
Dogma, then, is not to be a curtailment 
of individual freedom, but a safe and well- 
tried road to lead to the widest possible 
freedom. The Catechism treats in the 
most straightforward way of the funda- 
mental truths of God's dealing with men. 
Beginning with His choice of the child to 
be His child and the receiver of His Life, 
at once it calls for faith, and trains con- 



246 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

tinually by dogmatic teaching that natural 
gift of faith so strong in the child to prin- 
ciples of action and prayer and sacrament. 
The memory at its most susceptible age 
is stored with simple forms of expression 
that, lightened by Bible illustrations and 
parables of daily life, give the child just 
the necessary stimulant and guide to its 
own thoughts. The dogma alone is sure 
to lead to disaster, but the dogma repre- 
senting the authority, personified in the 
living teacher, and fitted with his living 
hand to the living child before him, is sure 
to produce thinking men and women able 
to give a reason for the faith that is in 
them. 

Very soon the child begins to use its own 
Prayer Book and takes its own intelligent 
part in the common worship. "When the 
Catechism is thoroughly committed to 
memory, and from time to time short 
verses of Scripture or of hymns added by 
way of illustration, the next memoriter ex- 
ercise is the Collect or short prayer which 
sums up the Gospel lesson of each Sunday. 
Here again the greatest care should be 
taken to avoid the tediousness of mere for- 
mality. If the teacher cannot or will not 



RELIGION IN THE SCHOOL 247 

find the spirit of the lesson and make the 
words of the prayer his own so that he can 
give something of it in a simple and at- 
tractive way to the child, let him not think 
that husks will taste any better to the child 
than to himself. The effort in private and 
in public is to teach the child to pray, to 
speak to God in God's language. The talks 
on the Collects between the teacher and the 
child provide fruitful ground for such 
teaching, and give occasion for instruction 
in private prayer. 

Then as to the common worship, how 
well some of us remember the dreary 
hours of our childhood spent in what 
seemed a meaningless restraint ! And, too, 
some of us remember how even a dumb 
reverence grew upon us in the long hour, 
simply through the close proximity of one 
we loved evidently filled with something 
we did not understand. And further, 
how changed sometimes the whole process 
would become by the strong personality 
of some leader! Now these dumb hours 
seem to me a great mistake. Much of the 
irreligion of men and women has come 
straight from these horrors of childhood. 
It is a very simple matter to modify our 



248 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

public worship to the understanding and 
powers of the child. When the Bible is so 
full of interest, why ever read before a 
body of boys a long, uninteresting chapter 
from the Old Testament or even some of 
the chapters from the Epistles that convey 
absolutely nothing to the average boy? 
Why indeed, except it be to train the child 
in ways of inattention! A school should 
have great liberty in the arrangement of 
its services, in order to train its children 
to a hearty response and reverent partici- 
pation in all parts of the worship. 

The Holy Communion is ever to be held 
before children as the crown of common 
worship, and their anticipations of their 
own part in that service should ever be 
kept alive. To a reverent child occasional 
attendance at this service in the presence 
of devout communicants is a great stimu- 
lus, I am sure, to its own devotion; but 
the practice of what is called by some non- 
communicating attendance, and by others 
Eucharistic Worship, seems to me out of 
tune with the robustness and sincerity of 
our whole Anglican system. The line of 
teaching and practice is clearly laid down 
in our book of Common Prayer, and loy- 



RELIGION IN THE SCHOOL 249 

alty to this is both practical and wise. 
Here we have distinctly enforced the prin- 
ciple of true worship: namely, after due 
self-examination, confession, and prayer, 
in conjunction with the memorial of the 
Sacrifice of Christ, the offering of our- 
selves, our souls and bodies, to be a rea- 
sonable, holy, and living sacrifice unto God. 
Here formality, carelessness, and hypoc- 
risy are brought face to face with the real- 
ity of the threefold witness of God, and are 
shown their true relation to this witness 
in unmistakable signs of life or death. 
One's experience in school and out of 
school all goes to prove the reliability of 
the faithful communicant. 

Children, in order to become and remain 
faithful communicants, need continual 
teaching, leading them on step by step to 
a fuller appreciation of the greatness of 
the sacrifice which God requires of them in 
return for the perfectness of His One Sac- 
rifice. Special hours of preparation for 
the Holy Communion, with definite instruc- 
tion both in public and private, are an 
absolute necessity to start our children on 
healthy growth into Christian life. 

Moreover, the wise teacher will not 



250 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

shrink from the personal sympathy and 
direct fatherly counsel where it is mani- 
festly needed. Great personal purity and 
sincerity are an absolute requisite for this 
close personal touching of souls, else un- 
told harm may result. But the wise teacher 
will shrink from what is called Sacra- 
mental Confession. A long experience 
with boys coming from all kinds of homes, 
under all sorts of religious influences, 
leads me to be very sceptical as to the wis- 
dom of this form of dealing with the souls 
of American boys at school. Again the 
great wisdom of our book of Common 
Prayer is evident: it is only in the office 
for the visitation of the sick, when mind 
and body are both less active, that the 
priest is directed to use his power of Ab- 
solution after private definite confession. 
Eeligion in the School, thus beginning 
with the teacher and ending with the 
teacher, has its beautiful and inspiring 
echo in the hearty rendering of the com- 
mon worship of prayer, praise, and thanks- 
giving, in psalms and hymns and spiritual 
.songs, making melody in all hearts. Music! 
Oh, surpassingly wonderful Music! How 
divine thy power to lift earthly man to the 



EELIGION IN THE SCHOOL 251 

very doors of Heaven ! No words are too 
strong or too beautiful for thy wings. We 
have seen hard men weep at sound of thy 
voice, and weak women become strong 
under thy spell, and great crowds of 
happy, careless boys sobered and carried 
with reverent, adoring hearts to kneel be- 
fore God's altar. 

Is this the end? Not yet. The boy be- 
comes a man ; and how is he to be prepared 
to meet not only the moral temptations of 
life, but the movement of the worldly 
thought as it is going on to-day? As the 
whole school-life must tend to build up his 
moral character, to send him out, as far 
as may be, a man in moral strength, so our 
religious instruction must aim to send him 
out first with religious convictions; and, 
second, with the equipment to win more 
convictions for himself. 

Let us be sure that we do not let the 
boy go from our doors as a mere inquirer. 
' ' We are not a society of inquirers, but a so- 
ciety of men of conviction, "has been well 
said by the Bishop of Stepney. We have 
a possession and a heritage which it is the 
most arrant folly to abandon or to give 
our children an excuse for abandoning. 



252 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

The boy goes out from his school ready 
to speak with no uncertain sound of the 
surety of the historical facts of his reli- 
gion; with no uncertain sound of the great 
corporate ever-accumulating experience of 
the Christian Church, as demonstrated in 
the secret recesses of the human soul and 
shared by all kinds of men of every age 
and nation, an experience too old, too deep, 
too wide to be explained away; with no 
uncertain sound of the practical applica- 
tion of the truths of his religion to the 
present needs of himself and of every sane 
man and of the great brotherhood of man. 
He will not be afraid of the truths of 
science: he treats them with respect, for 
he knows that when they have ^ proved 
themselves to be true, the interpretation of 
religious dogma will be sounder and more 
practical, as it has proved to be all through 
these advancing centuries of the Christian 
era. He will not be afraid of historical 
criticism, for he respects all true scholar- 
ship and hails all proven facts as allies 
to strengthen in the future what they have 
always strengthened in the past, the faith 
once delivered. He will not be afraid with 
his great heritage to join hand in hand 



RELIGION IN THE SCHOOL 253 

with Jews, Turks, infidels, and heretics in all 
that goes to the uplifting of his fellow-men 
and to making this world a better place to 
live in, for he knows that 

'' The Earth is the Lord's, and all they 
that dwell therein." 



xn 

COLLEGE 

A DISTINGUISHED college president 
, is reported to liave said to a distin- 
guished head-master, " I wish that you 

and your wife would come down to 

and look after your boys." 

Just so! Boys fresh from our homes 
and from our home-schools need looking 
after; they miss that personal friendship 
and fellowship with high-souled men and 
women which is their due. If there ever is 
a time when a boy needs such influence, it 
is between the ages of seventeen and 
twenty-two, as he is passing from boyhood 
to manhood. 

But what is our plan? These young 
fellows, full of the first rush of virility, are 
herded together, — no, not even that, — are 
allowed to herd themselves together in 
great and luxurious dormitories and in 
small eating clubs behind closed doors, 
with none of the natural restraints of the 

254 



COLLEGE 255 

society of their elders, often with not the 
smallest recognition, on the part of the 
college, of any responsibility for those es- 
sential habits of a man's life which are 
just then taking shape. 

The same distinguished president has 
taken pains, from time to time, to have 
prepared tables of statistics comparing the 
results of entrance examinations and the 
subsequent college careers of boys from 
high schools with those of boys from what 
purport to be home-schools, or, more par- 
ticularly, boarding schools under church 
influence. 

On their face, such statistics are entirely 
misleading: first, because only the best 
high-school boys, while nearly all from 
these boarding schools, try for college; 
and, second, because statistics of examina- 
tions and behavior are by no means the 
final word as to a boy's career at the col- 
lege or university. None know this better 
than the boys at College, who, as they 
grow there into manhood and have a fair 
view of the whole system from the inside, 
are going home in increasing numbers to 
send their brothers and sons to the well- 
ordered home-school. 



256 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

We suppose, also, that tlie authorities 
of our universities are as fully alive to the 
real truth as ourselves, despite statistics; 
there are abundant signs that these gen- 
tlemen are not perfectly satisfied with the 
cumbrous development of the American 
college into the American university. Ef- 
forts are not wanting all along the line to 
bring order out of chaos in the direction of 
personal supervision and fellowship owed 
by the older to the younger in the whole 
process of education. 

The American college was naturally the 
outgrowth of the American school, and the 
school of the American home. Parents 
in America, perhaps more than in any 
other land, have felt and carried the 
responsibility of fellowship with their 
children. We use this word advisedly, for 
no one will claim that we, as a nation, have 
shown in our home-life any great desire 
for the careful training of our children. 
On the contrary, at a very early age the 
child in our land has the run of the streets, 
as well as the run of his home, and he 
develops a power of taking care of him- 
self that is amazing to the foreigner. Yet 
there are homes in America where the chil- 



COLLEGE 257 

dren are treated as children, and, both by 
fellowship and by authority, are guarded 
in their earlier years from the roughness of 
life; homes where care is taken to develop 
the fine traits of childhood, reverence, obe- 
dience, and the power of the imagination 
with the appreciation of beauty in all its 
forms, — those very qualities which are 
early knocked out of the street child. 
There are still some parents in America 
who are not willing to sacrifice the broader 
and fuller and so slower development of 
their children to a precocious so-called 
manliness, and who think that a truer and 
stronger manhood depends on something 
else than '* learning to take care of one- 
self." 

The average American boy, however, 
when he comes to the college age, is a man 
in knowing how to take care of himself 
and in knowing the necessity laid upon 
him to make the most of his time. But 
does the College owe nothing to this im- 
poverished life, as well as to that of the 
big boy, in the way of personal contact 
with men whose love and enthusiasm may 
still give him what otherwise he will proba- 
bly never get unless he marries a large- 



258 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

hearted, fine woman'? But, alas! she, too, 
may be college bred, brought up in the 
same American (?) way. I must confess 
that personally I am awfully disappointed 
at this typical product of the American 
college, whether of man or woman. Their 
world is one of the survival of the small 
things of life, with much of the fuller and 
finer side entirely blotted out. The fit- 
test will not always survive amid uncon- 
genial surroundings. Surely it is the part 
of education from beginning to end to pro- 
vide soil for the growth of the best things 
in man. 

To return to the tables of statistics 
above mentioned: they take no account of 
the vast waste that goes on under a sys- 
tem which ignores so much to the exalta- 
tion of mere pluck and hardihood. The 
tables for this waste are found in the 
hearts of our settlement workers and 
lonely priests in orders and out of orders, 
who rise in protest against an education 
that seeks to measure itself by written ex- 
aminations and a money value, in protest 
against an education that does not pro- 
claim the whole truth, in protest against 
an education that in any way tends to 



COLLEGE 259 

divorce the apparent good of the individual 
from his usefulness to the community. 

In this land of liberty, it seems, the final 
battle between light and darkness is to be 
fought out, and, in view of this, our land 
can ill aif ord to have her children grow up 
in comparative ignorance of the relative 
values of truth and falsehood, of love and 
hatred, of purity and lust, of patriotism 
and individualism; of the relative values 
of life and the meat of life, of the body 
and the raiment. Lectures and courses 
in college will never teach these rela- 
tions, the knowledge of which is the only 
true wisdom. It certainly is a disgrace- 
ful fact that so many of our young men 
get a more true and helpful education 
in four years of the rough life of a miner's 
camp, or even in a business house, than in 
the same four years at college. "Why? 
Because any natural struggle with the real 
forces of nature and of man comes nearer 
to impressing on a man the true relation 
of things than the exotic life of our large 
American university. The wisdom em- 
bodied in the knowledge of the relation 
of man to man, of man to the rest of crea- 
tion as well as to the Creator Himself, can 



260 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

come finally only through close personal 
touch with men and things. That is the 
way we are made. Life passes on only 
through personal touch, and without this, 
it is sure to waste and decay. 

Two men, well known in their respective 
professions, were talking over college 
days, and one said to the other: 

'' Well, Bill, after all, what we got at 
college came mostly through old Tom. He 
was great." 

Let any mature man look back on what 
is called his education, and the chances are 
he will say the same of some friend of his 
youth. It is, after all, the men that we get 
to know in those days who start us on 
our ways with faces set to the light. 

In the plan now being developed in our 
large colleges and universities, such a per- 
sonal relation between instructors and 
undergraduates is largely chance. No tu- 
torial system developed in this country, 
so far as the writer knows, approximates 
in value to the system of the English uni- 
versity. This is what may be called the 
natural or home system carried from the 
great public school. And is there any- 
thing in this system that makes it, in prin- 



COLLEGE 261 

ciple, unsnited to our American life? On 
the contrary, it seems to the writer to sup- 
ply the very thing that we most need in our 
American education: namely, a stronger 
personal element, a closer relation between 
teacher and student. 

The small college of an English Uni- 
versity, with its dormitories, dining-hall, 
and chapel, organized under a head with 
assistants and graduates all living to- 
gether in a natural way, makes it possible 
and convenient for every undergraduate 
to be on intimate terms with older men 
who are directly responsible for him, while 
the great life of the University pervades 
the whole and tends to break down sec- 
tional and sectarian prejudices. 

If we examine the lists of the world's 
great men, we find very few who have not 
developed on lines quite different from 
those of the large American university or 
college. Indeed, it is surprising how com- 
paratively few of the most useful men of 
our own land, either in letters or science or 
affairs, have had what is called the ad- 
vantage of coming from one of our large 
universities. Not so in England; their 
great leaders in all departments of life are 



262 PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

mostly university men. And we are con- 
strained to confess that for general schol- 
arship and usefulness the world has never 
yet produced such a race of men as the 
university-trained Englishmen. 

Now, is it too late for us to organize our 
colleges and universities more on the lines 
of personal fellowship between older and 
younger men! I believe not. Much can 
be done at once to infuse more of this 
element. 

To begin with the entrance examina- 
tion, that which strikes the school-master 
straight between the eyes: the personal 
element in the school should follow the boy 
through and beyond this examination in 
the shape of a general certificate of fit- 
ness from his school. If the university 
could make it practical uO lay a great deal 
of stress upon this certificate, and then 
take the trouble to publish the records of 
boys admitted to college, and also the rec- 
ords of graduates, all listed according to 
their preparatory schools, it would not 
only open the eyes of schoolmasters to 
possible defects in their methods in a very 
effective way, but it would have a tend- 
ency to lay more stress on the personal 



COLLEGE 263 

factor throughout. Open discussion of 
such full statistics would be sure to have a 
beneficial result. 

The standard of entrance struck between 
the papers done by a boy and the estimate 
of his preparedness in character and schol- 
arship from his school would gradually 
tend to draw attention to the most im- 
portant requisites for a successful course 
in college. 

Furthermore, is it not possible to make 
the papers in all subjects more an exami- 
nation of the man and less an examination 
simply of his knowledge of facts? More 
an examination of his scholarship than 
of his memory? To be more specific, why 
set papers in mathematics that examine 
almost solely a boy's memory and his 
power to do fairly accurate figuring, when 
everybody knows that the test of his 
mathematical scholarship is his power to 
solve problems and exercises that involve 
all the principles and methods covered in 
his work? 

Why set papers in English that require 
a certain kind of technical cramming of 
the great English classics that generally 
spoils any real appetite for their beauty, 



^64> PERSONALITY IN EDUCATION 

when all that is really required is that a 
boy should be able to write and speak 
his own language in a scholarly way? An 
hour's essay, and a few minutes' oral de- 
scription of some event would provide an 
ample test of such ability. 

The writer remembers very well the ex- 
aminations set by his old school-master on 
advanced school work in Latin and Greek. 
They were marked by careful selections in 
composition and translations that gave 
occasion for a full display of one's ability 
in handling the language. And the ques- 
tions put on the paper invariably required 
thought as well as knowledge in order to 
answer them satisfactorily ; and they were 
formed in such a way as to bring out a 
great deal more than what lay on the 
surface. And as to the examinations in 
foreign living languages, let them not be 
lowered to the dead level of grammar and 
translation, but require some oral work 
that will test pronunciation and facility in 
speech. 

In the second place, it is not too late 
for our colleges and universities in coun- 
try towns to begin to develop more on the 
English plan of separate families directly 



COLLEGE 265 

under the personal influence of wise and 
experienced men. Princeton is doing much 
to clear the air of fog on this important 
question. The West and Middle West 
have ample opportunity to make use of all 
that we have hammered out here in the 
East, and some of their young universities 
are laid down on such broad lines as to 
insure a saner life for their manhood and 
age than seems possible now to obtain in 
Harvard or Yale without great expense 
and uprooting of tradition. 

Mr. Ehodes has started the shuttle 
across the Atlantic on a new garment. The 
examinations set for his scholarships, and 
the residence of so many of our best 
young men in Oxford, are surely weaving 
into our garment of education some fair, 
strong thread from the looms of the old 
land. Every teacher is watching the ex- 
periment with interest, and we are expect- 
ing far-reaching results from a plan which 
seeks to break into the wholesale factory 
for scholars with a new article marked 
'' personal." 

THE END 




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